WT Lite - WAP That Hades with Matt Bliss

Join Squidge and his very special guest Matt Bliss, as they take listeners on a hilarious journey through the whimsical world of Hades. Bliss and Squidge delve into the seamless integration of gameplay and story, the chaotic and cuddly possibilities within the game, and even take a comical detour into the complexities of Christopher Nolan's films. From imagining plush toy versions of fearsome enemies to remixing Cardi B's 'WAP' into the game's soundtrack, this episode is a delightful blend of humour, insights, and sheer entertainment.

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Spoiler Warning

Matt discusses some of the plot points in Hades, including dropping a pretty major spoiler. If you don't want to have the story spoiled, please skip the section between 15:49 and 17:23.

Show Notes

Because he started us off last time (and even though he was the guest for this one), Squidge introduced the episode and the idea behind it:

In this serving of bite sized banter with a side of gaming goodness, we catch up with Matthew Bliss, creator of podcasts From My Home to Yours and Dead Drop Game News about Hades.

Take it away, guys

— Squidge

The WT Lite series of episodes will be peppered in alongside the "standard" episodes, so keep an eye out for them. These episodes allow us to focus specifically on a specific game or series, and really focus on our guest's thoughts. And whilst this episode was about the hack-and-slash sleeper hit that was Hades, Squidge wanted Matt to introduce himself to everyone - even though he'd been on three episodes prior to this one

...But yeah, I'm delighted to be back on again in this nice little Lite edition. Hopefully I can be as much of a joy in your ear holes as Squidge is normally.

And yeah, this whole podcasting gig, it's something I've been doing for a couple of years myself. As Squid struggles to retain his liquids, he's just imbibed. I've had a few podcast on the go. My current project is one with my wife actually having just moved from Australia to Ireland. We've done a podcast about the move called From My Home to Yours and we share our emotions and experiences and all that kind of stuff. I've also had the one that brought me onto the Waffling Taylors I think was the Dead Drop podcast or Dead Drop Game News, which has been on hiatus for an unanticipated long time, though as you can imagine, me being away or trying to move to Ireland for as long as I have it has had to take a backseat. But I'm looking to bring it back.

So make sure that if you want to follow along with me and if you like what you hear in this episode, then yeah, from My Home to Yours or Dead Drop Game News.

— Matt

How Long Did It Take You To Reach The Surface And Beat Hades For The First Time?

Even though Squidge hadn't played Hades, he'd done some research into it before recording this episode with Matt; and it turns out that it has an insanely long "completionist" time of 81 hours - Jay: when compiling the show notes, I noticed that number had jumped to 95.5 hours - So the first thing that Squidge wanted to know was whether Matt had ever actually finished this game. To be honest, that completionlist time makes it look like more of a full-time job than a hobby.

As you said, Hades is one of those games that you just have to try and you get addicted to. You absolutely do. But you do have to take a bit of time to master it. So the first time round, and it was many years since I played it, it was a game that went into early access first, and I think I got it just before the early access window finished and it went into version one. So I've been playing it for a while. I think it probably took me like 20 hours to surface just because it is such a it's hard to describe the difficulty.

It's kind of like a Dark Souls thing where you play a game enough and you find yourself learning how to play it, and then you describe it to someone else and you struggle to find why it's so hard for them to do what you can do, but have spent 30 hours trying to having to learn yourself. It's definitely one of those skill based games. It is a rogue-like, though, so it is run based. So however many runs it takes you to get to the surface and the keep getting to the surface over and over and over again is the whole nature of the thing. But there's always plenty to learn in there. And that's where the 80 hours comes from.

This is something I forgot to check before we started this recording, but I've actually bought the game twice. I bought it on the Epic game store for PC. That was when it was in early access, and that was one of the secrets they had, too: it was only available on the Epic Store at the beginning. They did an exclusive deal with that for the first year, I think. And then it started to become available on other platforms.

But I'm just loading up the window now. So I've currently got 223 and a half hours on PC in Hades. And I have no idea how many hours I've played on switch because I don't know if there's a way to tell, but I would say it's probably about the same. I found that the rogue-like is excellent in a handheld, so Hades really suited that well for me

— Matt

What Makes Hades That Good?

Hades is one of those indie titles that ended up vying for the many Game of the Year awards when it came out; putting it right up there with the AAA titles of 2020 - the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, DOOM Eternal, and the Final Fantasy VII Remake. So what's so great about it?

The big mention here is Super Giant Games that developed it. The have been on a trajectory for probably the last ten years, I'd say at least prior to the release of this game because ... all their games are of a similar aesthetic. You started off with Bastion - I think that was back in the Xbox 360 days, xbox 360 Arcade or whatever it was. Then you had Transistor, which was a different game again. And then Pyre, which is another different game, but again similar aesthetic. And then they have Hades to round that out. And if you haven't heard of any of the three preceding games, that might be for good reason because it's kind of a tale of them learning everything they needed to learn to get to the stage of Hades where they created almost the perfect game, or at least it seems like the perfect game.

...

It's one of those games where you pick it up and it takes maybe half an hour and then you realize, "oh no, I can't put this down, this is going to be a problem for me." And I've done that a couple of times with games. Sometimes it's a delight to find that out, sometimes it's true and utter terror. For example ... Marvel Snap - that's the one. That one I played for like maybe half an hour. In fact, I've tried it twice for half an hour and each time I've gone, "sorry, I have to uninstall this because it's going ...