Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree Proves There’s Room for Hades-Likes

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | September 19, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree

Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree Proves There’s Room for Hades-Likes

September 17 marked the fifth anniversary of Hades. After almost two years in early access, the illustrious roguelite from developer Supergiant Games paved the way for a different appreciation of this Sisyphean genre. Rather than solely offering the pursuit of mechanical mastery, Hades interweaves a sprawling story and myriad smaller tales concerning its cast of characters from Greek myth into the runs themselves. Whether you’re victorious or meet defeat, your progress moves the narrative forward.

As someone who has kept up with the genre before and after, it’s easy to distinguish a developer taking influence from Hades. But everybody seems to pick something different. Reignbreaker and Sworn follow it to the T, evoking similar visual styles, metaprogression, and disdain against those who sit on thrones. Others, like Hell Clock, take the narrative-driven focus alongside influences from elsewhere, also evoking the likes of Diablo and Path of Exile, to tell a story rooted in Brazilian history rather than myth. And then there’s Valhalla, the free DLC for God of War Ragnarök that follows Hades so closely that Sony should have sent Supergiant a paycheck before releasing it into the world. Yet, it works—the DLC reshuffles its combat in a more bite-sized manner, away from the bloat of its blockbuster campaign, while presenting steady novelty after each run.

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In contrast, Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree doesn’t just oppose catchy nomenclature with an absurdly long name, but it presents a far more methodical approach. It starts with a long lore exposition, before taking you into a fight that, well, doesn’t amount to much, as it’s only there to show you the basic controls before moving the plot forward. I won’t go into how the story is tangled in timeline shenanigans—basically, you must defeat eight bosses to perform a ritual that will prevent a malign force from completely overtaking a village, and there’s a cast of eight characters that fight together in pairs. Easy enough.

Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree

But Towa doesn’t want to be easily digested. Instead, it seems adamant on stopping you in your tracks at every turn. Outside of runs, you control the namesake character and roam the village, which has a subset of NPCs to speak to. Most conversations seem a bit longer than they should be. Later on, when you start forging weapons, you have to complete a series of minigames at the forge, tackling each part of the blade. There’s a funny occurrence during the runs themselves, too. Towa does the thing where it presents new rooms to enter with an icon on each door, but these aren’t easily identifiable. Instead, there’s a button prompt for you to open an icons list and scan for it manually to read the entry and learn what it represents.

Even the foundation of the combat itself requires recurring pauses. The character pairs are divided into two distinct roles—one focuses on melee attacks, and the other handles spells. The designated melee character has two swords, and durability gets in the way of button-mashing through enemy waves. At some point, their weapon’s durability temporarily runs out, and you must switch to the secondary blade, which often has different movesets, until that one loses its durability, causing you to go back to the original one, and so on. The act of switching does perform an additional attack during its transition, though, and there are upgrades catered specifically to it, which is neat. At the same time, you can make it so the secondary character in charge of spells automatically follows their partner, making it so you only have to use magic when it becomes available. But this leaves them exposed to attacks. The alternative, then, is to manually use both characters simultaneously, which, at least with a controller, means moving them with each analog stick. You can forego the multitasking by playing co-op with someone else, but it’s best to approach the novelty for what it is.

The tedium of Towa was hard to ignore, especially since I’ve been playing Hades 2 at the same time to catch up on a few loose ends before it exits early access on September 25. The difference is polarizing—Hades 2 is fast in almost every sense, even more so than its predecessor. If you get lucky during a run, your build allows you to plunge through enemy rooms with ease. Sure, there are cooldowns, and there’s definitely a strategy involved, especially if you haven’t put over 70 hours into it like I have and you’re still learning enemy patterns or the best ability combinations. Yet, the responsiveness of your and your enemy’s actions is hard to imitate, even more so to match.

But Towa isn’t interested in any of this. The best encapsulation of its rhythm is also probably my favorite sequence. During runs, you occasionally bump into camps to rest. They’re there to let you replenish health and do some resource management before venturing into a new area, but they’re also an opportunity for characters to sit down by the fire and talk. Considering there are eight characters to pair in groups of two, there’s a clear ambition in making sure each combination has something to say or comment, even with that daunting number of permutations. Instead of rushing to the next room while maintaining the adrenaline of a successful boss encounter, Towa invites you to take a break.

It’s too early to know what exactly developers will take from the full release of Hades 2. If anything, based on the number of imitators, it seems that mentioning the word Hades at an investors’ meeting still has a strong cachet five years later. While I can’t get behind games that blatantly attempt to replicate others instead of searching for their own identities, it’s commendable to see studios being allowed to experiment and find their own spins on the genre, and decide exactly what to do with players’ expectations, whether that’s aiming for immediate recognition or disarming existing conventions. It doesn’t matter if they succeed or not—it matters that they try.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.