Just discovered some surprising similarities between Hades and the old SNES Enix game Soul Blazer

Soul Blazer is not an action roguelike, it's just a linear action/adventure zeldalike, but it has the same core loop of "start a run, you *could* do this in one go but probably won't, as you go you build up unlocks back in the home base, when you die you're eager to go see them"

So it takes two things that would be tedious (having to backtrack to see all your unlocks, and being annoyed at dying and restarting), and makes both of them serve as nice breaks for the other sequence to keep things fresh and motivation going forward

Like, if this was just a straightforward zeldalike where you went into dungeons and just respawned at the start at every death, and then the stuff doesn't unlock until you beat the dungeon, but otherwise everything is exactly the same, it'd be a lot less fun, just from pacing

Because it's actually kind of annoying when you unlock too much stuff at once and now it's a chore to go through it all and talk to everyone, but if you just unlocked a goat and a tulip and a nice shopkeeper, that's fun to just check in with them and then get back to the dungeon