They did trade-off good, impactful stories for tight, action-packed gameplay. Neither Pyre’s nor Hades’ core stories have been that interesting, despite the excellent voice acting, music, and gameplay.
The fact that they are doing a sequel to Hades immediately suggests that the trend is going to continue, because that’s where the money’s at. It’s a rather risk-adverse decision.
I would disagree with the choice of words here, yes their stories are often not super deep or intricate, but I do believe they are extremely interesting, specifically because they are presented in such an appealing way.
Just the elevator pitch for Hades sounds amazingly interesting, “you are the son of Hades fighting his way through procedurally generated dungeons to escape hell”, fuck yeah! Tell me more!
And the impact is definitely there as well, because while depth is missing, the qualities you described make what little story there is quite impactful.
Of course this is all just my opinion, but you can’t tell me that “you participate in ritualistic basketball games to free your comrades from a prison wasteland” doesn’t sound interesting.
I would disagree with the choice of words here, yes their stories are often not super deep or intricate, but I do believe they are extremely interesting, specifically because they are presented in such an appealing way.
I’m not talking about Supergiant as a whole. Bastion and Transistor had great stories. It’s just that, afterwards, they started to lose their ability to tell an impactful story, and dived head-first into worldbuilding (especially Pyre) and character development. Those sort of things are good to have, but not as the main focus of the story.
In Bastion and Transistor, worlds were falling apart. In Hades, some dude was pissy about his father and figured out who his real mother. <Insert Star Wars “family” meme here>
That’s fair. Hades wasn’t as much my jam, story-wise, as bastion or transistor, for sure. It leaned heavily on tight mechanics and beautiful art, which were also staples of bastion and transistor. So in a sense, I agree. I think there is only so much creativity you can have in a storyline based on something like Greek mythology, and so I’d like to see them return to more original plots.
They did trade-off good, impactful stories for tight, action-packed gameplay. Neither Pyre’s nor Hades’ core stories have been that interesting, despite the excellent voice acting, music, and gameplay.
The fact that they are doing a sequel to Hades immediately suggests that the trend is going to continue, because that’s where the money’s at. It’s a rather risk-adverse decision.
I would disagree with the choice of words here, yes their stories are often not super deep or intricate, but I do believe they are extremely interesting, specifically because they are presented in such an appealing way.
Just the elevator pitch for Hades sounds amazingly interesting, “you are the son of Hades fighting his way through procedurally generated dungeons to escape hell”, fuck yeah! Tell me more!
And the impact is definitely there as well, because while depth is missing, the qualities you described make what little story there is quite impactful.
Of course this is all just my opinion, but you can’t tell me that “you participate in ritualistic basketball games to free your comrades from a prison wasteland” doesn’t sound interesting.
I’m not talking about Supergiant as a whole. Bastion and Transistor had great stories. It’s just that, afterwards, they started to lose their ability to tell an impactful story, and dived head-first into worldbuilding (especially Pyre) and character development. Those sort of things are good to have, but not as the main focus of the story.
In Bastion and Transistor, worlds were falling apart. In Hades, some dude was pissy about his father and figured out who his real mother. <Insert Star Wars “family” meme here>
That’s fair. Hades wasn’t as much my jam, story-wise, as bastion or transistor, for sure. It leaned heavily on tight mechanics and beautiful art, which were also staples of bastion and transistor. So in a sense, I agree. I think there is only so much creativity you can have in a storyline based on something like Greek mythology, and so I’d like to see them return to more original plots.