Hades as Allegory for Gen Z's Desire To Escape

 

The first thing I did in 2021, even before getting out of bed, was to finish Hades.  I deliberately took my time with this game, having spent 109.4 hours and 96 attempts. I tried to figure it out all on my own without guides or walkthroughs.  Rogue-lites have been my favorite genre of videogame since I discovered Spelunky a decade ago, and it's cool to see how this little subgenre has developed. Many have said it, but I'll repeat it; Hades does everything right. It is >very< hard for a game to get me to care at all about its story/characters.  Especially cartoon characters.  But somehow they pulled it off.  The pacing of the various systems’ introductions and expansions and combinations is truly a masterful work of design art. 

But I want to talk about one thing that struck me from a thematic perspective. And that is how the plot is speaking to a generation.  Not my generation; but my kids.  I read somewhere that something like half of young adults under 30 are living with their parents now.  This game's narrative explores so many aspects of the tension that such a context produces.  And the mechanics of a rogue-lite (a seemingly never ending series of attempts to escape) resonate with the theme super well. 

My 21 year old son lives with us. He was born into a culture that, for a couple generations, had the expectation that as soon as you turn 18, you either get married and settle down or go off to college, then live on your own or with a significant other.  Either way, the idea was that parents became empty nesters when their kids hit 18.  This is, of course, a historical anomaly.  Throughout practically every other culture in all of history homes contained 3 or more generations of the family. But thanks to several lucky rolls of the dice, the US got prosperous enough that a couple generations found mechanisms for bypassing the discomfort of forced inter-generational co-habitation.  Very affordable suburban houses. Collage as the expectation for any who planned on upward mobility. Nursing homes for the elderly. These institutions become codified into cultural expectations for middle-to-upper-class Americans for almost a hundred years. 

And now we have the tail end of the millennials-and-younger dealing with the inevitable decline of those lucky economic times, in conjunction with expectations from older generations that no longer fit the world we live in. Many parents just assume that because they were able to move out, go to college, (which they paid for with a part time job) buy a house and a car, etc. all by their mid-20s, that the ‘failure’ of this generation to do so must be attributable to some internal defect. So now we have a younger generation trapped by economic realities on one side, and on the other: unreasonable judgement and frustration from parents who feel trapped and deprived of the ‘freedom’ they expected once their kid turned 18. (Personally, I’m very happy to have my son living with us, for the record.) 

This is the central dramatic tension in Hades. Our hero, Zagreus, son of Hades, longs to leave his home, but his massive and imposing father blocks his every attempt, all the while tearing him down verbally, and emotionally manipulating him.  Judging him for both trying to escape and for failing to escape.  

If the game maintained this beginning tension in the premise throughout the entire plot arc I would think it was clever and well done.  But what blows me away is how they crafted a character arc for every character in the House of Hades. From servants to pets to friends and parents. This narrative design impulse works beautifully as a forcing function, to push characters out of two-dimensional archetypes. The fact that they managed to morph various characters motivations while maintaining the core gameplay loop is truly a work of genius. 

To me, the profound value of this work is that because the premise involves parents in tension with their adult-children, AND they combined character arcs for all; the inescapable conclusion is a synthesis between opposing thesis and antithesis.  Most games present a challenge to be overcome in the form of a villain. You ‘beat’ the villain and thus the challenge is overcome and you ‘win’.  But instead, Hades rewards perseverance not with ‘beating’ the badguy, but by coming to terms with information that the ‘badguy’ (and others) slowly reveal. Perseverance is not a linear process of wearing a badguy down until you win. It’s learning why your obstacles exist in the first place. It’s discovering that your flawed parents have reasons for the things they think and do. And ultimately your perseverance produces a positive outcome for all involved. 

This is a wholesome twist that I don’t think I’ve ever come across in an action game. And I don’t think it could have come at a better time for our society.