Hades Creative Director Says Returnal Is ‘One of [His] Favorite Games’ This Year

August 11, 2021

With the new PlayStation and Xbox ports of Hades, the well-decorated roguelite is bound to get even more love and praise. But there’s more love and praise to go around to other roguelites, according to Hades Creative Director Greg Kasavin. Kasavin said he’s quite infatuated with Housemarque’s recent PlayStation 5 game, calling it “one of his favorite games” of the year so far.

Kasavin revealed this in a recent interview with ComingSoon. When asked about Returnal, he spoke highly about it, even though he hasn’t quite cleared the game’s last boss yet.

“Returnal is one of my favorite games this year so far,” he said. “I have not cleared a run, dammit, but I’ve played like several dozen hours of that game. I’m pretty deep into that game. Housemarque is a super cool developer. I’ve been following their games for years.”

But Kasavin didn’t leave it at that. He spoke about how Hades and Returnal similarly take the roguelite genre and push it in radically different directions and showcase the breadth and potential of this type of game can have.

“Apart from the roguelike structure and some of the narrative ambitions, Returnal and Hades are so different, especially with the whole point of view of the action,” he said. “I loved how Housemarque took their own point of view on the arcade style bullet hell combat that’s been in their previous games and presented it in the roguelike structure. It parallels us as we deliberately brought back some of the hack-and-slash Bastion gameplay that we worked on way back when and put it in a roguelike structure.”

He also called attention to Dead Cells and Slay the Spire, two other games in the genre that have unique interpretations of the roguelite foundation. But he came back to Hades and Returnal as the two also use the genre as a means of storytelling, too, which is a space that still hasn’t been thoroughly explored. And the lack of exploration was partly why Supergiant made Hades in the first place.

“When you make a game, you try to be the best of what it is or be unique in some way,” he said. “We felt like there was plenty of room, despite the many roguelike games, to still explore it further. And in our case, we wanted to use the structure as a premise to tell a story and think about a scenario where someone would die and come back over and over. And Returnal explores that question as well.”