Hi. This is part two on my quick look at Have a Nice Death (Magic Design Studios). Will there be more? Maybe. Here is post one in which I talk about the basics and then wander off as I tend to do. I just played a few rounds, and–well, let me put it this way. Hades II (Supergiant Games) just came out in Early Access–a shadow drop (on PC), that has me immensely excited. The original game also had an Early Acecss period that lasted nearly two years. I did not jump into the game until it was released from Early Access.
I must admit, I was not instantly enamored with the game. I could see it was well done and nicely crafted. It had great graphics, and I love Greek mythology. But, something about the gameplay wasn’t quite clicking. Again, it wasn’t the game as it was very well made. It was me. Do you want to know why I kept playing? Because of the interactions with the NPCs in the House of Hades and throughout the games. And the relationships between Zagreus (the protagonist) and various NPCs.
There are roughly 300,000 lines of dialogue in the game. I was seeing new dialogue even as I hundo chievo’ed the game. I found things that none of the reviewers mentioned beacuse they did not get that far into the game before reviewing. You have to beat the game something like 10 times to get the true ending.
I nearly didn’t make it to the first time I beat it beacuse the last boss was so hard. I could have used God Mode (makes game easier with each death), but I was too stubborn for that. When I finally beat the last boss for the first time, it felt like beating a FromSoft boss, almost.
Here’s my point. That game grew on me, obviously. The unlocks were meaningful and even though there were only four weapons, each one played significantly different. Especially as the unlocks made each weapon markedly different. The game was very elegantly designed, and one of the few knocks I had about it was that the combat got too hectic at some points. Which is something that many of these games do, including Have a Nice Death. There are so many things flashing on the screen that it’s sometimes impossible to actually focus on the enemy you’re trying to attack.
In Have a Nice Death, this is most noticeable in the boss fights. They have the flashing red warnings–in this case, exclamation points and such. At the same time, they have the boss exploding all over the screen and just filling it up with their attacks. I think because it’s 2D, it’s also harder for me to gauge where the attacks are going to land. My brain is not able to process what it happening on the screen before the boss does their move.
There is one boss I’ve only fought once who is very fast and almost like a Sekiro boss, and I could not do a thing against them. Not looking forward to fighting that boss again.
Here’s the thing, though. I’m not sure I’ll keep playing. In addition to the fact that Hades II is out (at least in Early Access), I just feel a sense of diminishing returns with each run. As I said in the last post, there were some intriguing threads with the NPCS, but I have the snking feeling that they’re just flavor text and not anything meaningful.
I can’t get over the fact that I can go more than one screen without seeing an enemy. That should not be happening in a game like this. The thing about a roguelike/lite is that the gameplay has to be tight. And it’s just not in this game. At times, I feel as if I’m just button-mashing. Which, fine, but I should not be going to that as my go-to. And I don’t quite understand how I’m killing things!
That’s another thing. I get that part of a roguelike is to have RNG play a big part, but in this game, it’s weighted too heavily. I have only had the chance to pick one of four starting weapons. I don’t know if there are ways to get more, but that wouldn’t be a problem if they had an understandable upgrade system for each weapon.
They don’t. Or I’m just not getting it. It could very well be the latter, but as in Dead Cells, there is a room you get to after beating the first boss. In it, you can upgrade/transform the weapons/spells, but I don’t really see any effect it’s had. I’ve upgraded a few things, but have not seen them in the wild. In Dead Cells, once you crafted a new weapon (can’t quite remember how you got new weapons) or upgraded one, you could find it in the wild.
I said this in the last post, but they needed to explain a few things more. The upgrading system is one. Another is how you store the weapons that you aren’t using. And if you can swap them into your playable weapons slots. Again, I feel as if they are trying to be like Dead Cells, but not getting what makes it work in that game. And, I would say that it doesn’t completely work in that game, either. But at least in that one, I understand why they have it the way they do.
In this game, I truly don’t understand what I’m doing with the transformation/upgrading. There is something you can collect in the game that can be used to upgrade the store (but only on that run, which I did not understand the first time I used it) or to transform/upgrade your weapons. I used it to upgrade the Twinsies (my favorite basic weapon) into the Agate Twinsies, but have yet to see the later.
To sum it up, I like the look of the game, the concept, and the lore/interactions. But the latter is predicated on the idea that they will all tie together in the end or that there is some bigger picture. The more I play it, the more I feel something is missing. I can’t tell you what it is, exactly, but I think I probably am coimng to the end of my time with the game. I will say that it’s a solid game. And it scratched that roguelike itch for several hours. It’s just that in the end, it’s not quite in the upper echelons.