![]() These weapons are further augmented by ‘boons’ – blessings from a lively cast of Greek gods. ![]() Using ‘Daedalus Hammers’ (a tip: always always choose these), each of these weapons can be utterly transformed – you can turn your shield into a homing missile, for instance, smashing enemy after enemy before it returns to you. You begin with a sword, but unlock five more weapons. Luckily, Zagreus has access to a practically limitless combination of upgrades. He sends wave after wave of minions, along with more fearsome figures from Greek legend. Each room threatens Zagreus with deadly traps, while Hades, the ultimate hater, remains hellbent on stopping him. Though each world is beautiful – a shimmering watercolour of bubbling lava and heavenly grasses, close to a kind of Western anime style – the escape isn’t. Zag’s escape route takes him through the torture dungeon, Tartarus, up to the Asphodel Meadows, across the Elysian Fields and out through the Temple of Styx. Hades scribbles away at his desk with a feathery quill, totting up the list of the dead these dead – the shades – work in an office, forever drowned in paperwork. Hades, a patriarch who exists in a state of permanent irritation, wants ‘Zag’ to straighten up, fly right and get back to work: Supergiant, Hades’ developer, depicts the underworld as a bureaucratic nightmare. It follows Zagreus – Hades’ son – a cynical, quick-witted jock with a heart of gold, who must escape his father’s domain to find his missing mother, Persephone. Hades takes place in the Greek underworld. And the best of these distractions – the best of the pandemic games – was Hades, originally released in September 2020 on PC and Switch, and out now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. They will be forever associated with the low-level dread hum and the tinnitus spikes of terror the miserable stream of bad and worse news the confinements, the illness and death. It’s surely right, then, that the games we played over the last two years will be forever associated with the pandemic. These can be happy recollections – a summer of Elder Scrolls coincided with your first love – or unhappy ones – your Street Fighter binge culminated in a bloody nose at London Trocadero for beating the wrong person at Street Fighter. Our memories of games are often tied to the time we played them.
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