Hades and the Beauty of an Accessible Game
I want to talk to you all about a game that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s called Hades, and it was made by the indie game studio Supergiant Games, who released it in full last year. Why do I want to talk about it?
Accessibility.
We all know that the games industry has been on a painfully gradual rise to better accessibility standards. There are very few studios that care deeply about being inclusive towards disabled players. Even the AAA studios don’t always put much effort in.
But with Hades, Supergiant Games has presented a fascinating way to make the game accessible.
Difficulty modes are well established as a feature of games. Easy, Medium, Hard. Sometimes there will be an extra hard mode. Yet some game studios (looking at you, FromSoft) have emphatically ignored adding difficulty modes, claiming that their game being hard is the point. This, of course, completely disregards the very obvious reason to have difficulty modes in video games: to make those games accessible.
And this is where Hades hits the bullseye.
(To provide a bit of background context: I play games one-handed. I don’t have fine motor control in my left hand, which makes pressing buttons tricky. So I play with my right, and have adapted my play-styles to suit.)
Instead of having your typical difficulty modes, Hades instead has God Mode.
“But that sounds hard! I don’t want that!” I hear you cry. However, God Mode is the exact opposite of hard difficulty. (Should you want more of a challenge, Hades offers that option in the aptly named Hell Mode.)
If you turn God Mode on in the settings, the next time you’re out on a Hades run, the damage Zagreus receives is reduced by 20%. And then, every time you die afterwards, 2% is added to that amount accumulatively, all the way up to 80%. And if you ever turn it off and then turn it back on, you don’t lose the progress of that damage buff. It’s a fascinating way to provide a more inclusive method of playing that doesn’t mock the player for an ‘easier’ mode. There’s absolutely no shaming. In fact, the game itself says to turn it on if you’re more focused on the story than you are battling bosses.
When I first started playing Hades, I’d known about God Mode, and I had absolutely no hesitation in enabling it. The game was still tricky – what rogue-like isn’t when you first begin? – yet then I started noticing that I had a winning streak. I was defeating the final boss again and again – and I was thoroughly enjoying it. Each completed run, no matter if Zagreus died or won, meant that the story progressed and I could get to know the characters more. I could discover their motivations, their personalities, their quirks – and best of all, their stories. I’ve always been more into narrative aspects of video games; Hades provides those aspects in spades. And with God Mode enabled, the battles weren’t frustrating but fun.
As a disabled player, the lack of frustration – frustration being an emotion I have grappled with my entire life due to living in a society not built for disabled people – was so wonderful that I nearly cried. At last, here was a video game that included me and didn’t scorn the fact that I used the accommodations it offered. Instead, it extended a hand to welcome me into its world in a way I’d never experienced before.
So here I am. From me to you, here is this essay boiled down to its simplest message:
Supergiant Games have made a beautiful, accessible, inclusive video game.
And I cannot recommend it enough.
