Hades was a trial of my soul. That’s appropriate. I mean what else should a game named Hades be?
The game is just one big trial metaphor. You are Zagreus, the son of Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. You’ve learned there are family secrets, that you have a mother living in the outside world. Hades, your father, for his own reasons, doesn’t want you leave Hades to find her. If you are to find Persephone you are going to have to fight your way through four levels of the underworld: Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx. The final boss is, of course, Hades himself.
The game has everything I love in a game: Music, great graphics, professional voice acting, character development, a great storyline, and challenging game play. It’s this last element that nearly ruined the game for me.
To be sure the game play is brilliant and generally very satisfying. There are six different weapons that offer different styles of fighting. There are any classes of enemies—rooms full of them—that take different strategies to beat. It’s always a thrill to finish off the last opponent in a room, get your reward, and move on.
The game is difficult. Any good game is. At first you lose because you are inexperienced along with the fact that you haven’t gained certain powers and abilities to level the playing field with your opponents. Then you gain the experience and abilities only to reach the next level where the opponents are more difficult. Arriving at the final boss with enough health and lives to have a chance at beating him is a victory in itself even if you lose to Hades. Of course, there is no complete satisfaction until you beat Hades.
I get frustrated easily. I don’t have to be the best at anything to be happy, but if I’m not seeing progress in my game play, I have to fight the urge to quit. Each time you log into the game you are shown how many escape attempts you have made. For me, this roughly equated to how many times I died trying to escape since I had never beaten Hades. At one point my youngest son showed 70 escape attempts. Of those escape attempts he had succeeded 40 times. At my lowest point in the game I had 143 escape attempts with no successes. I felt like such a loser compared to my son. He went on a 10 game winning streak while I was still struggling to even get to Hades, let alone beat him.
Eventually I turned on God Mode. This is an ingenious game play mode that lets you level up your resistance to damage in 2% increments until you reach 80% resistance. When I reached 60% resistance I started beating Hades regularly. I’m self-aware enough to know that this didn’t make me a winner. It helped me push the storyline along, but I was still a loser.
Finally, I just accepted the fact that the game was too hard for me. I finished the storyline and decided I was done. The next day, on a whim, I turned off God Mode and started to play just for the fun of it. Wouldn’t you know it, I went all the way and beat Hades. I sat in disbelief after that win. I checked to make sure God Mode was off. It was. Then I switched weapons, played through the levels, and beat Hades again. Over the next few days I beat Hades with all six weapons. How did it feel? It was something akin to huffing your way up a mountain wondering if the climb was ever going to end. Suddenly, you step up on the summit, and the view is breathtaking.
To this day I ask myself, “What happened?” One day it was impossible. The next day I couldn’t be stopped. I talked with one of my sons about this. We decided that once you realize you can win, you can win. Yes, that’s simplistic, but at the foundation, it seems to be the truth. I had quit, but not in the bad way. I thought I had quit playing the game; it turns out I had actually only quit caring about losing so much. When losing didn’t matter, the game became more fun and winning became possible.
I’m sixty-one years old. I think I’ve learned this lesson already in my life—more than once—and yet it was good to be reminded of it again. I’ve moved on from Hades. My game playing experiences, like my life, continue. Currently I’m playing Gris and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There will be more lessons to learn or be reminded of. I’m looking forward to it.
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These books by Tory Anderson are now available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format:
