Hades
It's New Year's Eve as I write this, so let's take a minute to reflect on videogames this year. (My usual bullet post will come later, probably).
Man, I played a lot of Cyberpunk. But this blog post isn't about that. It's about Hades.
I got Hades ages ago on the Switch and played it a bit. I feel like I bounced off it a bit. I think you need to be in the right frame of mind for a roguelike. You've got to resign yourself to the idea that playing this game is probably going to suck for a while. Progress is slow, you're going to get frustrated a lot and you're going to be beating your head against a wall over and over for quite a while before you feel like you've actually accomplished anything.
Mastery isn't a big draw for me in videogames. I usually come for the story. Hades' story is pretty good, which helps. As it turns out, I ended up playing it quite a lot, and now I'm pretty good at it.
Hades II came out over the summer and it was looking pretty great. That motivated me to go back to Hades, picking it up for next to nothing in the Steam summer sale, rather than picking the Switch up again.
I've made it through all the story bits of Hades and I'm now enjoying the grind enough that I haven't moved on to something else, but I feel like it's a matter of time. I don't think I'm going to jump straight into Hades II, tho. The fact that it's easy to pick up and put down helps. I'm finding that's a big draw for the Steamdeck. I guess it was for the Switch too.
I'm very happy Ellen talked me into getting the Steamdeck last year. It's been a bit of a godsend with all the stresses and tensions of the year.