Hades II‘s Ill-Defined, Unserious World Undermines the Depth and Power of Mythology

By Grace Benfell | October 9, 2025 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features hades ii

Hades II‘s Ill-Defined, Unserious World Undermines the Depth and Power of Mythology

Can fantasy take itself seriously anymore?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot between Hades II runs. Like the first game, it is an irreverent take on Greek myth. The sirens are part of a rock band, complete with a drum kit and wailing guitars. Its witches use Tarot cards, an Italian invention from the mid-15th century. Weapons include automatic rifles and missile-blasting mech suits alongside axes, knives, and staffs. The intention here is to make the sometimes alienating classics breathe with new life. But the effect is another kind of alienation. Hades II‘s world is ill-defined and scattershot, swimming in references that lack a central coherence. Without details, it can only occasionally grasp at depth.

Take one example: the villain Chronos. He is Hades’ own father, continuing the games’ fixation on daddy issues. He has somehow reconstituted himself and fights our divine heroes to win control of the world. He already taken Hades’ realm of the afterlife. He is the God of Time and his visual design pulls from clockfaces. Chronos’ underworld is overrun with ticking gears and other machinery. In the boss battle against him, you fight atop a giant clockface, which also structures some of his attacks. But clocks are not an elemental symbol of time. When Chronos existed as a part of widespread religious practice, there were no mechanical clocks at all. Clocks are an easy shorthand, the obvious choice. Thereby, they are the less poetic or fantastic one. Hades II’s Chronos still wields a scythe, but lacks any of the associations with the seasons and harvest that he had in antiquity. There would be many ways to render Chronos, complex and ancient as he is. Hades II goes for something recognizable and legible, losing its source materials’ fuzzy strangeness.

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This is a problem inherited from the original game. Each of the ancient Greek gods has a horrifying grandeur. In The Bacchae, Dionysus drives a woman into such a frenzy that she kills his son. In Sappho’s poems, she calls Aphrodite a “snare-knitter,” and says, “she has almost killed me with love.” In Hades, both these gods are associated with shallow elements of their domains. Dionysus is a frat-ish party animal and Aphrodite a simple flirt. The reduction of these figures into tokens leaves a sour taste. These are gods that people did (and still do) worship. That doesn’t mean you can’t treat them comically, but they are worthy of something more interesting. Although Hades II pulls from both immediately recognizable and more arcane parts of myth, it pulls wide, rather than deep.

Great fantasy fiction, whether it pulls from myth or not, requires a seriousness that can be more than a little embarrassing. Imagine, if you will, old J.R. describing the world of Middle Earth to you at cocktail party in 1935, not knowing that this imagination would turn into a classic of English literature. But it is exactly that seriousness, unseemly at a party, which makes those books so vivid. Even the Peter Jackson films, which add some quips and silly Hollywoodisms, have nobility to them which has ensured they remain beloved.

For another, contrasting example, take Ursula K. Le Guin. Earthsea is quite playful with the fantasy literature of the past. For one, most of its main characters are Black and brown. In the first book, our hero is a power-seeking wizard, brought low through his own arrogance. He gains wisdom not from conquest, but from acceptance, a rather feminine attribute for a mighty wizard. Yet, there is no sense of satire or cheekiness to these stories, even as Le Guin turns her critical gaze towards her own choices. The stories feel as natural and old as the roots of trees.

Lest I be accused of unfairly comparing video games to the best fantasy literature, I don’t think this problem is exclusive to video games. Gideon the Ninth is shot through with memes. Brandon Sanderson’s prose is straightforward. Even as his stories become ever more entwined and convoluted, his magic is clearly defined. I don’t know that these are bad choices on their own, but they reflect wide trends that feel suffocating in aggregate, ones which contemporary games are in direct conversation with.

To be fair, Hades II is in a tough position. The Greek myths themselves, once common culture, rendered alive through oral performance, are now left to stuffy academics and hyper-fixated nerds. It might be hard for the average person to feel that this has anything to do with them. The game works hard to appeal to both those with no context for these stories and people who own multiple translations of the Odyssey. Furthermore, incongruity with the actual era of ancient Greece is easy to poke holes in and therefore cheap heat. When it is so blatant, it is clearly by design.

The problem is not those incongruities as such, but how they communicate so little about the world. In the case of some of the weapons, and the divine robots found on Mount Olympus, high technology reflects a divine power. But then, why do the Sirens have electric guitars and microphones? If its witches use tarot, where does it come from? Even more basic, there is little sense of what Hades’ world is like for ordinary people. A tidy coherence would also be too easy. But what Hades II offers instead is broad signifiers with only the most basic meaning.

In every patch note released during Hades II’s early access run, Supergiant included a quotation from an ancient source of myth. This reflects the way Hades II presents itself: as a gateway to a wide world of literature, culture, and art that exist beyond it. But it represents Hades II at its worst: the mystery and grandeur of myth chopped and screwed, deemed too strange for its audience to understand more than a fragment of.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.