There is No Escape: Fighting through Hades in 2020

This is an essay about the video game Hades, released a few months ago in 2020. So naturally, let's talk about the future of humanity. I’ve been wrestling with a deep despair lately. I imagine many of us have been feeling terrible throughout this horror show of a year and the awful years preceding it. But more than anything, I’ve been grappling with the weight of history; how once you learn more about how humanity has always been, once you learn how more and more of the things you thought were good or just neutral have been co-opted by the forces of power and dominance, a clear picture begins to emerge.

In many ways, the world is getting worse. Right-wing authoritarians or would-be authoritarians have risen to power across the world, from China, to Russia, to India, to the UK, and of course, the USA. Violent militias and white supremacist terrorists are considered even by the Department of Homeland Security (far from a leftist institution) to be the gravest terror threat to America. Nations now have even more capability to survey and control the populace than ever before. A small handful of the unimaginably wealthy continue to consolidate wealth and steal it from the rest of us. Corporations merge and competition is smothered. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the pandemic yet, which as of the writing of this essay has killed over 1.3 million people worldwide, and around 250,000 in the US alone.

The recent election of Joe Biden is a slight reprieve, but by most world standards, Biden is a conservative himself. Even if he wanted to do the sweeping changes that are necessary to stave off the worsts of our coming climate disaster, fix our corrupt and broken political system, actually give healthcare to all Americans, and more, he’s likely going to be blocked at every turn by the Republican-dominated Senate, the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, and the increasingly gerrymandered state legislatures. It’s very likely that Biden manages nothing much of note in his presidency, whether or not he even tries. Yes, "anything can happen," but Biden is not a young man, and the Democratic Party has shown over and over again what they truly believe...which isn't much. Just look at the corporate stooges he's already going to be packing his administration with.

Trump has not been defeated, not truly, not finally. There’s still two months until Inauguration Day, and lots of evil still left to accomplish. It’s looking like his efforts to steal the election will fail, but I put nothing past Trump, the Republican Party, and 2020. But even then, the narrow margins of Biden’s victory have done nothing to dissuade Trump’s huge and growing fanbase, and the man is nothing if not petty and vengeful. It’s all too plausible to imagine him carrying on in a sort of government-in-exile, building resentment for four years, and to sweep to victory against Kamala Harris in 2024 (assuming Biden does not run for a second term.)

If that happens, we’re in for an even worst time than 2017-2020.

It’s hard to look at the future and see anything worthwhile for the forces of progressivism, true democracy, freedom, and equality that I believe are moral and good. Ideas that are not even close to my ideal utopian future, but that would at least be nice steps in the right direction, such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, expansions to voting and democracy like ranked-choice voting, abolishing the Electoral College, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, etc., seem like pipe dreams now. Those policies are not pie-in-the-sky impossible on a technical level; nothing there is actually too difficult to implement or hasn’t been done successfully elsewhere. But in the face of an intransigent Republican Party, an enormous Trumpian voter faction, and the Democrats own pro-corporate agenda, all of those reforms and policies seem out of reach politically.

It seems like power always wins. It seems like history has always been and will always be the story of the few dominating the many, of every hard-fought victory for the forces of the people and justice and freedom and equality being followed by a powerful reactionary swing backward. Can we ever make things better, really?

The long arc of history bends towards justice, we’re told. But that’s not true. History swings back and forth, skitters and stops, takes plunges downward, moves up for some and down for others, on and on and on. Even if it were true up to this point, that doesn’t necessitate that it’s true later on. And even if the world I want to see would be in the cards many years and lifetimes from now as humanity slowly struggles, stepping forward and backward, towards something better…the looming threat of climate change casts its shadow over all of those possibilities.

We’re already in it. We’re already seeing the increased rate and strength of global natural disasters, from hurricanes to pandemics. We’re already seeing climate refugees, failing crops, mass wildlife extinctions, political unrest, and all the symptoms we were told were coming. They’re here. And they’re going to keep getting worse. Even if we managed to pull out all the stops and work together as a planet to avert them, they’d still come, because the consequences are not felt for many years after. And we’re not even just failing to do what’s necessary.

We’re actively making it worse.

All this to say, I’m glad Trump was defeated in this election. It’s a real victory. I think Biden is pretty terrible, and will likely be ineffectual at best, but another four years of Trump would be catastrophic.

But things are not looking good.

We’re in hell, and I don’t see how we escape from it.

All this brings me, of course, to Hades.

See, I’m going somewhere with this.

Hades tells the story of Zagreus, the son of the eponymous Hades of Greek Mythology, and his attempts to escape from the underworld. His father, charged with maintaining order and endlessly chronicling the souls of the dead, doesn’t want his son to leave, and he’ll throw all the forces of Tartarus, Asphodel, and Elysium at Zagreus to stop him. Our good hero Zagreus needs to fight all the way through these three levels of the afterlife, facing Furies, dragons, and dead heroes along the way, all so he can face off against his own father at the top.

Is he strong enough?

For much of the game, probably not. You see, Zagreus dies. A, um, hell of a lot.

Hades is an example of a particular sub-genre of action game called a “rogue-like,” which, to make things simple, is an action game where death means starting over from the beginning. Over many, many, many failed “runs” of the game, you as the player should naturally improve, to the point where the fun of the game comes from this sense of learning and progression even as you lose over and over again. I’ve never much been interested in rogue-likes, mostly because they’re notoriously challenging, and most of them don’t have much of a story.

And yet, Hades is my game of the year, full-stop. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Supergiant Games’ first game, Bastion, has been a beloved game of mine for years, and their subsequent games have all been beautiful to look at and listen to, even if I’ve never finished them. But with Hades, it feels like they’ve finally crafted their masterpiece.

From its beautiful art design, to its re-imagining and remixing of Greek mythology, to its increasingly varied and satisfying combat, to its excellent voice-acting and music, to its surprisingly affecting story, it’s a real work of art.

But what really makes Hades sing for me is how it takes the basic framework and assumptions of the rogue-like genre and turns them into a cohesive story. It’s literally about struggling through the same trials and turmoil again and again, only to fail every time, all the while growing better, learning more, changing the world around you ever so slightly.

Hopefully you can start to see why these two halves of this essay fit together.

When Zagreus dies in Hades, he just goes back to where he started, the entry-way for all the dead in Tartarus: the House of Hades. He emerges from a pool of blood, shakes himself off, talks to his friends and family, and gets ready to go out there again. The world remembers that he (and by extension, you the player) fought and died, unlike most other rogue-likes, and Zagreus can even keep some of the advancements and items he’s collected. You can level up his powers and strengths, unlock new weapons, slowly buy things (many simply ornamental and visual) to fix up the House of Hades for its many inhabitants, and form bonds with Gods and demigods alike. Yes, most of the time I’ve fought through this game, I’ve failed. I’ve died while at the end, facing off against Hades himself, more times than I can count. And yet, Hades doesn’t make these defeats seem worthless. After all, each run gives me the opportunity to unlock some new powers that will help me in the long run, or at least gives me some treasure I can use to buy some nicer rugs for the lounge. Zagreus is getting better after each failure, but even more than that, I’m getting better as a player.

I’ve watched Zagreus die time and time again, but it doesn’t really feel like failure.

Every time Zagreus dies, the screen goes black and blood-red, and the words “There is No Escape” appear on the screen. This is truer than you’d think, even a few hours into the game.

Zagreus cannot escape from the afterlife, not really.

Mild spoilers below

That doesn’t mean I didn’t defeat Hades. I did, and Zagreus walked out of hell onto the fresh beauty of the Greek Islands in the winter. He walked slowly, breathing heavily, through the quiet morning. All he could hear was the soft waters lapping against the snowy islands, feeling for the first time in his life, truly alive.

And yet…Zagreus learns quickly that he in fact died as an infant, and thus cannot stay on the mortal plane for very long, and soon, he finds himself falling sick…and dying.

Only to emerge from that pool of blood in the House of Hades yet again.

There is no escape, indeed.

Yet I’ve kept going, and as of writing this, I’ve bested Hades six times and clawed my way to the land of the living, just to savor the taste of the fresh air and the brilliant green of nature, even as the clock ticks rapidly, and Zagreus succumbs to death again.

One of the mythological characters Zagreus encounters in the game is Sisyphus, a clever king who was punished in the land of the dead by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall back down. Again and again. For all eternity.

Sisyphus in the game is actually quite a charming bloke, who’ll help Zagreus out by giving him some money or healing. He's not the main character by any stretch...but in a sense...he kind of is?

Despite Sisyphus actually being in the game, I think it’s truly Zagreus that represents Sisyphus in our greater cultural understanding. Zagreus fights – over and over again – to escape, only to die before reaching his end, or – if he manages to escape – still succumbing to death after only a few short hours.

Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus famously used the myth of Sisyphus to argue that we are all like this doomed king, forced to push our own boulders up our own mountains, only to watch them fall back down again. It’s enough to drive anyone to despair, like I’ve been feeling. Yet, in the face of that absurd trial, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why?

Either the world can be made better, or it can’t. None of us can ever really know, caught in such a small fraction of the human story, only ever able to see the present through a glass, darkly, the past through shrouds of haze and myth, and the future not at all.

If the world can’t be made better, than despair is the logical answer. But despair still doesn’t do anything. It only accelerates the world’s destruction. A doomed hope, a fight that we know we can’t ever fully win, can be itself cathartic, can be meaningful. If the evil bastards will win anyway, we can at least make it tough for them. We can at least spit in their faces as they kill us.

But if the world can be made better after all…

Then giving into despair only serves the powerful. Then fighting to make it better actually makes all the difference, even if we’ll never see it.

So it stands to reason, that whether or not the world can be truly improved, acting as if it can be is in our best interests. Either we find a sense of community and purpose in a glorious doomed struggle, or in a beautiful, ultimately successful one.

All of this made intellectual sense to me before playing Hades. I could have written something with a similar moral beforehand. But, perhaps because the pandemic has kept me isolated and inside for so long, it was playing through Zagreus’ struggle that really made this idea feel real to me. It doesn’t matter if Zagreus can never escape from hell. The fight is meaningful. The bonds he makes with his friends and family along the way are meaningful. Even the efforts to spruce up the House of Hell and make it a better place to be are meaningful. Even if fighting the forces of hell doesn’t make them weaker, it at least makes us better at fighting the forces of hell.

And it just might give us more of those few precious, all-too temporary glimpses of the land above…

My dreamt-of utopia likely will never come to pass. (What exactly would that look like? Wait for another blog post at some point!) Humanity may continue to be the sorrowful tale of the powerful few oppressing the many; a long litany of petty vengeances, fear, violence, random death, and above all, suffering. Everything we achieve will be undone – if not by reactionary backlash, then by the march of time. What’s the point?

I don’t know the answer. I haven’t done nearly enough to make the world a better place, and I hope to – especially once the pandemic ends – do more organizing, protesting, campaigning, and collaborating in my community. I've been mostly sheltered from the worst things that the world can offer, though that doesn't stop me from feeling horrible that others are subjected to them. I haven’t earned my cynicism or despair, and I haven’t often tasted the joy of a win, no matter how small, no matter how temporary.

But I think I know what it might feel like.

I think it feels like walking onto the snows of Greece and gazing at the sunrise. I think it feels like that short walk to a beautiful farm, a moment of joy and connection with the people I love, a deep breathe of the fresh air, knowing that soon I’ll fall back into Hades, but that for a moment, just one beautiful moment, I’d escaped.

And so all we fall back, die again, plunge into the sea of blood and emerge in the House of Hades. But we’ve made this prison a little better after all, haven’t we? That rug looks nice. We can go for a drink in the renovated lounge now. We’ve made some friends and lovers. And the beauty of the living world is still there in our memories.

Let's fight through hell again, just for another taste.