Hades 2 Accessibility Preview

Hades is a top down action roguelike game originally released in early access in late 2018, and later officially released in 2020. The game followed the story of Zagreus, trying to escape the underworld ruled by his father Hades, to reach his mother Persephone on the surface of the earth.

A couple of weeks ago, in mid April 2024, Supergiant Games announced a technical test build of Hades 2 would be made available to a select number of random Steam users, to help identify technical bugs and issues prior to the game’s upcoming Early Access launch.

While the test period for Hades 2 has now ended, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the technical test, and was able to spend around five hours playing the opening sections of the game.

While this technical test of Hades 2 is an in development build, and we have no official word on how soon the game will be going into official early access availability, there is a decent amount of accessibility settings support available in the current build, as well as a few design choices which are worth discussing ahead of the early access version going on sale.

Supergiant Games have said that Hades 2 will be entering Early Access “very soon”, but I have no idea if that means a few days, a few weeks, or a few months from now. The game might be on sale by the time I publish this, or it might still be a ways away from release. Regardless, I feel it’s worth taking some time to praise some of the settings already in place, and discuss some of the steps which could be taken to improve the game, particularly for arachnophobic players.

Firstly, a little overview more broadly on Hades 2. The new title is a direct sequel to Hades, set a nebulous time into the future. Zagreus, Hades, and Persephone have been imprisoned by Chronos, the titan of time itself, and Zagreus’ younger sister Melinoë is tasked with questing to reach and defeat this embodiment of time itself.

Both the core gameplay loop and the moment to moment mechanics of Hades 2 will feel very familiar for those who played the first game in the series. Players explore a hub environment full of non-aggressive NPCs, before selecting their weapon of choice and delving through a series of randomised rooms full of enemies, selecting doorways to progression based on which god’s abilities they’re hoping to create a combat build from. These rooms continue until you reach a boss enemy, and then presumably continue onto the next area.

While much of Hades 2 feels deeply familiar, including the systems around providing NPCs with gifts in order to receive equippable trinkets, there is a decent amount that has changed to help give this sequel a solid sense of its own identity.

In Hades 2 for example, rather than magical projectile casts being limited in number, and needing recovering from the battlefield before they can be fired again, these projectile casts are now an essentially infinite resource. This means that ranged strategies seem to be a lot more viable while wielding melee weapons than they were in the first Hades. Sprinting also now has increased utility compared to dashing, with upgrades allowing for example dashing to leave a trail of flames which dispel projectiles.

Additionally, the game now offers a dedicated magic meter, which can be used for ranged casts and weapon specific special abilities. In the technical test some examples of this included being able to fire a line of magic forward and backward while using a spear type weapon, or being able to slow down time and dash in close for melee assassinations while wielding a pair of daggers. This magic meter has a number of other interesting uses too, such as being able to cause damage while sprinting with one upgrade, damaging enemies captured in a casting circle, or calling down a huge column of energy with another upgrade.

When combined, Hades 2 seems to offer a pretty good mix of the familiar and the novel. For every returning god from the original game there’s new sexy character art of them. For each new god there’s a handful of new abilities mixed into their old god movepools. For every new small mechanic like farming seeds or mining minerals there’s a very familiar feeling weapon archetype. While the game feels a lot more encouraging of builds mixing in ranged projectiles, it’s still giving you the melee weapon options that you used to have access to.

While I could go more into depth on the narrative of Hades 2, or the currently available mechanics, I feel some of that might be worth instead waiting until the game enters early access to go into more depth on. Instead, I’m now going to take some time to discuss the game from an accessibility perspective.

Considering what I played was an early technical test build, I was honestly impressed at how many of Hades 2’s accessibility settings options were already in place and available. All too often these kinds of settings are not made available in early demos for games, and often they’re missing when Early Access begins, and while none of the settings that were available were a huge surprise to see based on the original game, it was still really positive to see them there this early, ready ahead of Earlt Access.

God Mode from the original Hades is back in Hades 2, and while the technical test doesn’t go into depth on how it’s balanced, we can assume that it will function very similarly to how it did in the first game.

In the original Hades, God Mode provided players with a 20% reduction in enemy damage dealt, making the player more durable to incoming attacks. Every time that the player died while God Mode was active, they would gain an additional 2% enemy damage reduction buff, maxing out at 80% damage reduction after 30 deaths. This mode could be turned on and off at any time, with the damage reduction stat only increasing upon death while the mode is active, and not resetting progress if it’s turned off.

While God Mode didn’t prevent players from progressing narratively or mechanically, and didn’t block players from earning achievements, the game did place a flag on runs that were completed using the feature to differentiate their completion times from runs that were done without the assist feature.

God Mode was a really interesting novel approach to difficulty scaling in a roguelike, allowing for death to more meaningfully translate slowly but steadily into increased progress for players who were eager to see more of the plot, and it’s a really welcome returning feature.

Beyond God Mode, Hades 2’s technical test build featured an aim assist toggle, an option to auto advance dialogue, an optional on screen timer, options for toggling or altering vibration intensity, options to tweak analogue stick deadzone and reticle speed, remappable controls, interface opacity options, and an option to turn off damage numbers if the player finds them distracting.

Additionally, the technical test build of Hades 2 features a dedicated accessibility menu, with several useful and interesting options available.

While Hades 2 featuring a subtitles toggle isn’t surprising, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Music Subtitles toggle, allowing for song lyrics to be shown on screen when applicable.

While presenting song lyrics to players in subtitles should be a given, it’s unfortunately not super common at present in the games industry. Often, rights for reproductions and covers of songs are handled separately from lyrical reproduction rights, and many game developers avoid showing song lyrics on screen to avoid paying for additional rights to do so. This makes songs in games at times inaccessible. While it shouldn’t be notable, it’s nice to see that this has been considered.

Hades 2 also features an autofire setting, but it requires a little bit of context to properly explain.

The way that Hades 2 advertises its autofire setting is that players can hold down an attack button to repeatedly attack multiple times in a row, rather than having to do a separate button press input per spear thrust or dagger slash. While this is technically true, there is a caveat to be acknowledged.

With the currently available weapons in the technical test, both the regular and special attack buttons for each weapon will indeed cause a series of repeated attacks when held in autofire mode. The thing is, after a short period of button holding, no more than one or perhaps two combo strings, the game will read your held button as you wanting to use your magic meter to activate that button’s magical cast ability.

This doesn’t mean that autofire is pointless, it definitely does reduce the number of inputs required for rapid combos, but it’s also important to know that you can’t just hold a button down indefinitely to act as though you were mashing that input. You will need to every few attacks briefly release and re-press the attack button to continue acting as though you’re mashing inputs. It’s effectively reducing the number of inputs required by around 75% or so, it’s a good, helpful option, but it is worth understanding what it does and how it functions in context.

Beyond that, the Hades 2 accessibility menu currently offers the ability to turn audio to mono, make your on screen cursor brighter and more visible, and reduce screen shaking as a toggle.

While that’s it for accessibility settings options currently available in the Hades 2 technical test build, there is something I think is worth discussing ahead of Hades 2 entering early access, a potential issue for players who suffer from arachnophobia.

If you’re watching the video version of this accessibility review, please be assured I will tell you when to turn away from the screen and when it’s safe to return before showing you any images which may cause you issues if you have arachnophobia.

The first area that the player explores in Hades 2 contains a spider NPC. She is very sweet and pleasant, a helpful character who crafts silk armour with defensive buffs and secondary effects, but she is a spider. She’s somewhat personified, with a cute hairstyle and outfit in her conversational character art, but when not in conversation she appears as a spider on a web, in a room full of cobweb cocoons.

This NPC can be avoided, if you know what to look for. Her room seems at present to be unique to the first area of the game, and is marked with a door that appears to show two hands being held together. You could avoid entering this door in most cases to avoid entering her location, but you would miss out on her mechanical boons.

While I recognise that this character being a spider is important narratively to Hades 2, I also recognise her addition to the game is going to cause issues for some arachnophobic players. While it is possible to consciously avoid her rooms once you know how to do so, doing so would mean avoiding her valuable reward items.

I would love to see Supergiant Games take arachnophobia seriously, and offer an arachnophobia mode in the game. What form that might take is a matter for debate amongst arachnophobia consultants, but my suggestion would be an option to enter the room and simply see a blank screen with an option to either engage in dialogue with the NPC, give her an NPC befriending gift, or to skip straight to reward armour selection, before then being given a choice of door icons to leave the room. This would allow her narrative and mechanical functions to be optionally accessible, separated from spider iconography for those who are impacted.

Beyond the potential need for an arachnophobia mode, Hades 2 very much seems to be following the playbook of the original Hades in terms of its approach to accessibility. While I could talk more broadly about accessibility settings that I’d love to see implemented in future such as High Contrast Mode support for example, my general take-away right now is that the game very much takes what worked in the original Hades, and makes sure it’s there from day one in the sequel. While little of what’s here in terms of settings is surprising, it is reassuring that this stuff is implemented before the early access period has begun for the game.

I absolutely loved my time with the Hades 2 technical test, and how it balanced familiar and novel elements to create something that feels like it justifies revisiting this game world. I hope that the developers take onboard feedback about potentially adding arachnophobia mode, but otherwise I feel pretty positive about the game as it approaches its initial paid release.