Hades
The Boulder, Reloaded: On Hades and the Joy of Dying Again
There is a moment, somewhere around your fifteenth death, when Hades stops being a video game and starts being an argument. You have been stabbed by a skeleton, incinerated by a bone hydra, or—most humiliatingly—killed by your own father, the lord of the dead, who delivers a paternal sneer before sending you back to the House from which you began. The screen fades. The River Styx receives you. You walk, again, past the same shade-clerk, the same mournful musician, the same sleeping hound. And you pick up your blade, again, to try the same impossible escape.
Supergiant Games did something sly here. They took the structural skeleton of the roguelike—a genre defined by death and recommencement—and wedded it to the one Greek myth that already understood what such a structure meant. The result is the rare piece of popular art that doesn't just illustrate a philosophy but performs it. Hades is not a game about Sisyphus. Hades is Sisyphus, handed a controller.
Consider what the roguelike form actually does to a player. It strips away the consoling fiction of progress. In most games, you save your file; the world holds your achievements; you advance toward an ending that justifies the slog. The roguelike refuses this contract. Each death wipes the slate. You return to the starting room with your accumulated knowledge but none of your accumulated stuff, and you begin the climb anew, knowing—because you have done this fifty times—that you will probably fail. The labor is real. The boulder is real. The hill is real. And the form insists, room by room, that you keep pushing.
The sleight of hand, and the reason the game's argument works rather than collapses into nihilism, is that Zagreus is not a sufferer. He is a smartass. The game's protagonist meets his eternal recurrence with a half-grin, a shrug, the flick of a hand through bloodred hair. He is, in the most precise sense available, an absurd hero: lucid about his condition, unconsoled by metaphysical promises, and in revolt against a father who insists the order of things is the order of things. Hades the king is the perfect domestic tyrant of cosmic resignation—This is how it has always been, this is how it will be, sit down—and Zagreus's answer is to keep walking out the front door and getting himself killed.
What makes Hades genuinely interesting, rather than merely clever, is what it does with the ending. Without spoiling too much: Zagreus eventually escapes. He reaches the surface. The sun, the longed-for, the impossible, touches his skin. And then, because of how his body works, he dies and goes home. The escape was never an escape. It was an errand, repeatable, insufficient as a destination. The credits do not roll. You wake up in your bedroom. You go again.
A lesser game would treat this as tragedy. Hades treats it as the point. The "real" content of the game—the conversations with Achilles, Nyx, Megaera, Dusa, Orpheus, the gradual reconciliation with a wounded mother and a wounded father, the slow construction of a chosen family among the damned—accumulates only because you keep dying and coming back. Meaning is not the reward at the end of the rainbow. Meaning is what happens between attempts, in the kitchen, in the lounge, in the small exchanges with people who would not exist for you if you ever managed to leave for good. The game has discovered, by sheer mechanical instinct, the same conclusion the essay on Sisyphus reached eighty years earlier: the rock and the hill are the life. There is no other.
The game knows this, by the way. It is utterly unembarrassed about its sources. At a certain point in your descent you will meet, in person, a character named Sisyphus—genial, bearded, pleased to see you, at peace with his boulder, which he has named Bouldy. He offers small kindnesses. He seems, against every reasonable expectation, content. The cameo functions as a wink: the developers know exactly which philosophical lineage they have stepped into, and they are confident enough in their handling of it to give the old man a speaking role. One could read this as cute. I read it as a thesis statement. The game is telling you, in the friendliest possible voice, that the figure you have been told to pity is in fact the figure you should learn from.
The revolt at the heart of Hades is not a revolt against repetition; it's a revolt against the meaning that repetition is supposed to lack. Hades the father is the voice of every tradition that says suffering must be redeemed by transcendence or it is nothing. Zagreus, sword in hand, replies that the suffering is the life, the life is worth living, and that the people you love down here in the dark are not consolation prizes for a sun you cannot keep. This is a position more radical than the surface charm of the game suggests. It refuses both the religious answer (endure, and be saved) and the nihilist answer (it's all meaningless, lay down). It chooses the third, harder thing: lucid persistence, in good company, without guarantees.
It is no accident that this game became a phenomenon in 2020. A great many of us were, that year, locked in cycles we had not chosen, waking into a same-shaped day and trying again to get somewhere we could not reach. The game arrived as an unlikely instruction manual. Not because it promised escape—it explicitly refuses to—but because it demonstrated, with mechanical patience, that a life made of attempts could still be a life. That the people you check in on between attempts are not the waiting room of meaning; they are meaning. That despair is a category error committed by anyone who thought the boulder was the problem.
There is a temptation, when writing about a video game, to apologize for taking it seriously, to gesture toward the medium's adolescence and beg the reader's indulgence. I will not. Hades is one of the cleaner pieces of philosophical art produced in the last decade, in any form, and its philosophy is not pasted on; it is encoded in the verbs the player performs. Every attack, every death, every walk back through the same hall is the argument restating itself. The game asks the only question worth asking—why keep going—and then refuses to answer in words, because the answer is the going.
One must imagine Zagreus happy. The game makes it easy. He already is.
There is a moment, somewhere around your fifteenth death, when Hades stops being a video game and starts being an argument. You have been stabbed by a skeleton, incinerated by a bone hydra, or—most humiliatingly—killed by your own father, the lord of the dead, who delivers a paternal sneer before sending you back to the House from which you began. The screen fades. The River Styx receives you. You walk, again, past the same shade-clerk, the same mournful musician, the same sleeping hound. And you pick up your blade, again, to try the same impossible escape.
Supergiant Games did something sly here. They took the structural skeleton of the roguelike—a genre defined by death and recommencement—and wedded it to the one Greek myth that already understood what such a structure meant. The result is the rare piece of popular art that doesn't just illustrate a philosophy but performs it. Hades is not a game about Sisyphus. Hades is Sisyphus, handed a controller.
Consider what the roguelike form actually does to a player. It strips away the consoling fiction of progress. In most games, you save your file; the world holds your achievements; you advance toward an ending that justifies the slog. The roguelike refuses this contract. Each death wipes the slate. You return to the starting room with your accumulated knowledge but none of your accumulated stuff, and you begin the climb anew, knowing—because you have done this fifty times—that you will probably fail. The labor is real. The boulder is real. The hill is real. And the form insists, room by room, that you keep pushing.
The sleight of hand, and the reason the game's argument works rather than collapses into nihilism, is that Zagreus is not a sufferer. He is a smartass. The game's protagonist meets his eternal recurrence with a half-grin, a shrug, the flick of a hand through bloodred hair. He is, in the most precise sense available, an absurd hero: lucid about his condition, unconsoled by metaphysical promises, and in revolt against a father who insists the order of things is the order of things. Hades the king is the perfect domestic tyrant of cosmic resignation—This is how it has always been, this is how it will be, sit down—and Zagreus's answer is to keep walking out the front door and getting himself killed.
What makes Hades genuinely interesting, rather than merely clever, is what it does with the ending. Without spoiling too much: Zagreus eventually escapes. He reaches the surface. The sun, the longed-for, the impossible, touches his skin. And then, because of how his body works, he dies and goes home. The escape was never an escape. It was an errand, repeatable, insufficient as a destination. The credits do not roll. You wake up in your bedroom. You go again.
A lesser game would treat this as tragedy. Hades treats it as the point. The "real" content of the game—the conversations with Achilles, Nyx, Megaera, Dusa, Orpheus, the gradual reconciliation with a wounded mother and a wounded father, the slow construction of a chosen family among the damned—accumulates only because you keep dying and coming back. Meaning is not the reward at the end of the rainbow. Meaning is what happens between attempts, in the kitchen, in the lounge, in the small exchanges with people who would not exist for you if you ever managed to leave for good. The game has discovered, by sheer mechanical instinct, the same conclusion the essay on Sisyphus reached eighty years earlier: the rock and the hill are the life. There is no other.
The game knows this, by the way. It is utterly unembarrassed about its sources. At a certain point in your descent you will meet, in person, a character named Sisyphus—genial, bearded, pleased to see you, at peace with his boulder, which he has named Bouldy. He offers small kindnesses. He seems, against every reasonable expectation, content. The cameo functions as a wink: the developers know exactly which philosophical lineage they have stepped into, and they are confident enough in their handling of it to give the old man a speaking role. One could read this as cute. I read it as a thesis statement. The game is telling you, in the friendliest possible voice, that the figure you have been told to pity is in fact the figure you should learn from.
The revolt at the heart of Hades is not a revolt against repetition; it's a revolt against the meaning that repetition is supposed to lack. Hades the father is the voice of every tradition that says suffering must be redeemed by transcendence or it is nothing. Zagreus, sword in hand, replies that the suffering is the life, the life is worth living, and that the people you love down here in the dark are not consolation prizes for a sun you cannot keep. This is a position more radical than the surface charm of the game suggests. It refuses both the religious answer (endure, and be saved) and the nihilist answer (it's all meaningless, lay down). It chooses the third, harder thing: lucid persistence, in good company, without guarantees.
It is no accident that this game became a phenomenon in 2020. A great many of us were, that year, locked in cycles we had not chosen, waking into a same-shaped day and trying again to get somewhere we could not reach. The game arrived as an unlikely instruction manual. Not because it promised escape—it explicitly refuses to—but because it demonstrated, with mechanical patience, that a life made of attempts could still be a life. That the people you check in on between attempts are not the waiting room of meaning; they are meaning. That despair is a category error committed by anyone who thought the boulder was the problem.
There is a temptation, when writing about a video game, to apologize for taking it seriously, to gesture toward the medium's adolescence and beg the reader's indulgence. I will not. Hades is one of the cleaner pieces of philosophical art produced in the last decade, in any form, and its philosophy is not pasted on; it is encoded in the verbs the player performs. Every attack, every death, every walk back through the same hall is the argument restating itself. The game asks the only question worth asking—why keep going—and then refuses to answer in words, because the answer is the going.
One must imagine Zagreus happy. The game makes it easy. He already is.
Mini Review: Hades isn't just a game about Sisyphus; it is Sisyphus, handed a controller. Supergiant Games takes the roguelike genre—defined by death and repetition—and transforms its punishing loop into a profound philosophical argument. Its protagonist, Zagreus, is the ultimate absurd hero, meeting his eternal recurrence with a smirk. Hades insists that meaning isn't a reward at the end of a journey; it’s the connections we forge between failed attempts. One must imagine Zagreus happy.
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