Okay, didn't get a ton of responses on my #HadesGame feeler the other day, so I'm going to put all of my thoughts in this thread. Mostly spoiler free, I'll tag spoilers at the top. Mute the thread if you get tired of my ramblings about this game. There's so much to talk about!

For those who don't know the game, it's an action game that most reminds me of Diablo 3. It's single player, no net required. It has a great story twined around Greek mythology. The story pieces are unlocked visual-novel style after you encounter things in the game play.

It's also a rogue-like. That is, when you finish the game, you have some resources to give you more options/power, and then go out and play it again. The ability to replay the game is phenomenal - I'm up into the 60s in playthroughs right now.

Average time is 20-40 minutes. You can stop at the end of a floor if you need to. There's essentially five floors, so you're looking at an investment of eight minutes or so at a time, if you don't have hours to put into the game all at once.

This game is a master class on world building. It is absolutely saturated with little hints and pieces of information that it just lets you pick up. Later, you'll realize 'hey, that's related to this other thing!' and then later still, you get the payout of that connection

It's Greek mythology, so if you've read/studied that at all, some of the beats can be anticipated, but I say it like that for a reason - you look forward to them, they're not strictly predictable. You suspect what will happen, but then you actually get it and the payoff is great

Now I'm going to get into the gameplay. To give you an idea, I'm 60+ playthroughs in, I've beaten the game on the fourth difficulty (Heat 3). The first thing I'll say is that there are a lot of mental traps in the game! There's a lot of depth to the combat that's not obvious

One of the first traps is 'this power/weapon/keepsake sucks'. If you think that it sucks, you are missing something. One of the worst powers I saw was an Artemis power; your gems pop out of enemies faster. Oooh big deal, right? Well if you play it right, yes.

There's another power that deals damage to enemies whenever your gem pops out. Also a 'this sucks' power. The actual damage is MASSIVE! There's a weapon that will force gems to pop out too. Another 'meh' skill, but you combo them, and BOY HOWDY is it ridiculous.

You might think 'it's too hard to force combos, it's all RNG, so those actually suck.' No. It is hard to force combos, but you have a lot of tools - including the lousy keepsakes that summon a particular god. Once you get the god once, they tend to turn up all the time

So between the keepsakes and your rerolls (a later game mechanic), you should be able to reliably see the same god four or more times. You can get that power. You can make a strong combo. This goes for pretty much everything in the game. Nothing is without purpose.

If you're having trouble, from here on I'm just giving tips.

You're probably dashing in the wrong direction. You should be dashing toward danger. You are invulnerable during the dash, and once you're on the other side of the danger, it's gone.

In the beginning, you just take a pot-luck approach to your build. Whatever seems good, you take it. That works fine, but as you get further on, you need to be thinking ahead of what powers have effects that combine.

Some of the best combos are actually with the same god. For example, Poseidon's Breaking Wave ability does extra damage on knocking things into walls, and a lot of his abilities have knock back. However, the shield and sword also have a lot of knock back, a good combo.

You're probably overvaluing Athena's deflect and/or using it wrong. Almost all the things that you can deflect, you can just hit with your weapon anyway and avoid the damage, or just time a dash. Deflect is an offensive ability, not a defensive one. Remember that and use it.

If you don't like a weapon, try using something else until you have the Titan blood to unlock a new form of the weapon. All the weapons have at least one form with a different move set.

If you're having trouble on normal (heat 0), think about where you're having trouble and built toward that. It's easy to fall into the trap of 'chain lightning is great, it helps me clear rooms', but if you're having trouble with bosses, then room clear doesn't matter.

Instead, pick something like Dionysus's hangover attack. It's not good at clearing rooms, but it applies amazing single target damage. Clearing rooms might take you longer, but that doesn't matter as long as you get through, and it'll help more with bosses.

If you haven't realized this already, give everyone one nectar, at least. They'll reward you in kind. Spending more than one can be wasteful, but you can look that up if you're worried about it.

On the skills page, there's a <> toggle button on the left. You actually have two entirely different sets of skills that you can mix and match. Don't just level the defaults, take a look at what's there and match them to your playstyle.

You should be switching keepsakes between levels regularly. I recommend the Shattered Shackle for floor 1, Broken Spearpoint for floor 2, Evergreen Acorn for the rest. You can and should mix this up with the god given keepsakes to get the boons you want for your build on floor 1

Cosmic egg is also good on floor 1. Master Chaos's effects are very good to get early because they tend to scale over time. They're less valuable later, because they ask you to pay a price right when the game is getting difficult, and have less time to scale.

You're probably making wrong decisions around gold. If you're strong, save the gold for healing. If you're weak, don't waste the gold on healing, spend it to get strong.

If you lose a Death Defied on the way to getting strong, that's okay. You can make that up with more gold at purple fountains, or the ! encounter on floor 3. In fact, ! encounters are almost always the best choice.

If you have more than 300 gold, go to Charon's shop over whatever other choice you have. If you need a boon, you can buy one. If you need max life, you can probably buy it. If you need healing, you can buy it. If you have 300 gold, you don't need more gold to finish the run

Spending gold at purple fountains should be to refill Death Denied, or to save your run from ending, like with health. Most of the power ups are pointless, unless you can get them right before the floor boss.

I say they're pointless, but that's not exactly true; they're pointless once you've gotten to a certain point in the game. They're there to make the early game easier, so if you're still in normal and struggling, use them! Particularly damage oriented ones.

God related tips: Aphrodite's weak is amazing. 30% less damage dealt by enemies is the same thing as 30% more health, or 30% damage resist. Her charm on the Call is very circumstantial. Avoid it unless you have a specific build in mind.

Zeus's call is really only good if you have some related Zeus power ups. I avoid it unless I've got a Zeus build. Poseidon's is very good for bosses, less so for room clear. Artemis, Demeter, and Ares are all generally good. Athena's is generally bad.

Dionysus's is generally good, and Hangover is just good in general. Similar in power to Rupture, slightly better than Doom, in my opinion. The god of festivity is one of the best in the game.

For the shield, blocking is not obvious. If you charge Bull Rush (hold attack) but do not let go, your shield is in front of you. It blocks all damage from that direction, just like the act three boss. It's very easy to cheese bosses with this, but room clear is harder.

The bow might seem weak at first, because you can't fire it quickly. However, it can hit multiple enemies in a single strike. Avoid powerups like Chill or Hangover, which want a lot of attacks, and use your dash to position multiple enemies for a single strike.

Conversely, on-hits are great for Admant's Rail. Doom and Seeking arrows are great. Chill is also very good. Poseidon's knockback is a problem though, so I tend to avoid it.

With the bow, if you get Aspect of Hera, Poseidon and Dionysus's cast abilities can be particularly good.

With fist, chill can be great if you get the power that pops it for a blast at 10 stacks. Otherwise, it's kind of meh.

The sword is very generic. Almost everything is good on it with very little that's bad. If you can get the third strike in, Poseidon's Breaking Wave and Sea Storm can be great. Otherwise, look to empower the special or cast instead.

Be careful with Daedalus Hammer. You can take one easily, but after the first, there is usually a tradeoff, and that can be hard to make, especially on later floors when your build is already complete. I now avoid the 2-for-1 trade in Styx after it turned Rail into a shotgun

The shotgun mod isn't bad - on floor one, when you have time to play with it and build around it. When you're going into the last fight in the game is not the time to get surprised by such a drastic change.

Okay, that's all my tips. For a summary: #HadesGame will be my 2020 Game of the Year, easily. It's one of the best games ever, in my opinion, easily top 10. The story is masterfully told, the world building is exquisite, and the payoff when you win is extraordinary.

Even when you lose, you can still feel like you accomplished things, and it doesn't feel like a failure. If you like the core gameplay, I think this is easily one of the best game ever. It may look 'too fast' for you if you haven't played similar games, but it's not!

The dashing makes it feel frantic when you're watching, but it's not actually more frantic than the leaps/dashes/teleports of many other games. It's much less frantic in the hand than it is watching it. That's it for this thread!