There Is No Escape

“it’s no surprise that a game about repeatedly attempting to escape from a violent, labyrinthine hell from which there is no escape (as one fan noted) continues to strike a chord for many.”

“But the appeal of Hades lies less in its offer of escapist fantasy than in the way it forces players to confront everything they seek to escape in endless, recursive loops. And it is in the very act of repeated confrontation, the game argues, that survival in the absence of escape becomes possible”

“In his Theory of the Novel, literary critic György Lukács attributes the genesis of the novel to the loss of the closed totality of the Homeric epic. He describes antiquity as an era where objective reality could be portrayed “as it is” because there was no disconnect between the self and the world. Divinity had left its fingerprints on every part of materiality, and total understanding of this immanence wasn’t necessary — just full acceptance”

“But in the modern era, Lukács argues, this sense of cohesion has been lost. The gods have abandoned their posts, the oracles have died, and the threads of fate have worn thin. Individual life, culture, and society are no longer inseparable — more often than not, they’re at odds with each other. There has been a shift from experiencing and accepting the world “as it is” to constantly yearning for a world as it “should be.””

“Lukács diagnoses this condition of alienation as “transcendental homelessness” — lacking a sense of unifying totality, individuals are haunted by an “urge to be at home everywhere” that is impossible to achieve”

“Hades, in its distinctly modern yet self-contained revival of ancient myth, embodies this conflict between the epic and the novel — between the rigid certainty of an essentialist reality and the terrifying boundlessness of a socially constructed one”

“Multiverses offer comfort by proposing that no chance or option is wasted — consolation in the reassurance that you are not truly alone in the choices you make”

“Ultimately, using the same principle that drives time loops and time travel, multiverses seek to solve the dilemma of being stuck in the worst timeline”

“Zagreus is trying to escape to a world where he no longer has to prove his worth or question his right to exist. But his journey ultimately confronts us with a hard truth: What if this is all there is?”

“What if there are no kinder worlds or habitable planets, no infinite do-overs or second chances? What if there is no escape, no matter how hard you try?”

“By obviating nominal identity, Hades gets at the heart of what hurts most about its disavowal: being made to question whether you were meant to exist at all; being forced to compromise between fixed notions of what you “should” be and your own self-knowledge and will to be your truest self; and having to make the difficult choice to abandon the good parts of home because you can no longer bear the bad”

“Hades himself has changed, as have the rest of the denizens of the Underworld — not so much that they’ve transformed the essence of who they are, but enough to have made room for the possibility of reconciliation and closure. A space has opened that may not offer true comfort or ease but has the capacity to hold love without exacting a price — a home that may one day be made by choice rather than by resignation”

“Hades is an absurdist take on finding meaning in the sheer effort of survival — a story about making and repairing relationships once condemned to fail and finding purpose in the endless quest of dismantling an unjust system that precedes you and will inevitably continue after you, and a demonstration of making incremental changes that won’t solve the problem but might make it a little easier to bear for those you care about”