There’s a lot to love about Hades. From its diverse cast of memorable characters to its endlessly replayable gameplay, Hades is easily one of the best and most ambitious Roguelikes ever released. I’ve personally sunk over 120hrs into the game and have played more than 100 runs and I still have so much left to do. Despite all the time I’ve spent on the game, it still feels just as captivating as it did when I first picked it up in early access. You might be thinking that this is because of the game’s overwhelming amount of content, and sure, that’s a pretty big factor. But Supergiant actually uses one little design trick to help encourage you keep the game fresh.
It’s the Dark Thirst mechanic! But why is this mechanic so effective at keeping the game from feeling stale? The reason is that it subtly conditions you into maximizing variety. Let’s dive into why this mechanic is so effectively at keeping you engaged.
If you haven’t played Hades yet, the Dark Thirst mechanic is deceptively straightforward. At the start of each run, you get to choose a weapon to take with you on your escape attempt. At random, one of the weapons will have a shadowy purple aura indicating that it has the temporary Dark Thirst buff. If you choose the weapon with Dark Thirst, you’ll obtain 20% more Darkness during that run (which is an in-game currency used to purchase permanent player upgrades from the Mirror of Night). These upgrades are extremely useful and are borderline essential if you want to make it to the surface.
When you’re just starting out as a new player, you’ll tend to gravitate towards using whichever weapon has the Dark Thirst buff. Initially, it’s just an easy way to unlock upgrades faster. But because the Dark Thirst buff swaps to a different weapon each run, it also encourages you to try out a variety of weapons and playstyles while you figure out which ones are your favourite. This variety and discovery helps keep the early game feeling exciting, and is really useful for easing you into the game’s mechanics.
But by the time you reach the midgame, Darkness has become pretty useless. By then you’ll have unlocked everything in the Mirror of Night, so Dark Thirst isn’t really valuable anymore. Luckily, this is right when you can unlock Darker Thirst, which extends the buff to also increase the amount of Gemstones you find by 20% (Gemstones are another in-game currency used for renovating the Underworld). You need a truly ridiculous amount of Gemstones to unlock everything, so this buff encourages you to keep trying out random weapons, even though by now you know which ones are your favourites (i.e. Shield, Bow, & Rail. Don’t @ me).
Geez, I still need a LOT of gems…
Eventually, after countless hours of grinding, you’ll finally unlock all the upgrades from the House Contractor. Now that you no longer need Darkness or Gemstomes, the buff from Darker Thirst doesn’t matter anymore. Now you’re free to choose whatever weapon you want!
…But despite having the freedom to choose whatever you want, you still keep picking whichever weapon has that shadowy aura. Why? Because the game has conditioned you to do it. And that’s a good thing.
See, as gamers, we’re pretty good at optimizing things. That’s why we all started using the Dark Thirst buff in the first place. Over time, we’ll figure out which strategies we like and we’ll stick to them. But eventually, we bore ourselves by doing the the same strategies over and over again. We trick ourselves into thinking the game has become repetitive, but it’s actually because we’re ignoring all the alternative playstyles the game has to offer.
But because the Dark Thirst buff swaps to a different weapon each run, Hades helps you to avoid settling on one repetitive playstyle. Instead, it encourages you to change things up every run so the game never gets a chance to feel stale. Now you won’t get bored from using the Shield over and over again, because you’ll have spaced out your Shield runs with a bunch of Rail, Bow, Sword, Spear, and Fist runs in between (even if you don’t really like the other weapons).
To put it simply, the Dark Thirst mechanic helps you save yourself from boredom.