Hades is not an easy game, nor even a necessarily fair game at times; this comes with the territory of the modern roguelike game, so a seasoned player wouldn’t be surprised by it. The place where Hades fundamentally differs from other roguelikes is in its treatment of death. Instead of being an intensely unpleasant loss of resources, or a complete reset of everything the player had accomplished to that point, death in Hades is a necessary mechanic to tell the game’s story and a highly forgiving way of teaching the player how to improve.
The House of Hades is the game’s hub world of sorts, with a shop, a place to test weapons, and much of the game’s dialogue and story progress. The only way to access this hub is to die on an escape attempt, meaning death goes from something to avoid at all costs to a minor annoyance; on the one hand, the upgrades the player picked up on the run are lost, but on the other hand, they get to experience more of the story and learn more about the main character’s situation that he’s trying to escape. Tangentially, the game doesn’t have a “game over” screen when the player loses a run, instead telling them bluntly that “there is no escape;” another instance of the unusual treatment of death in a game built around escaping death’s domain.
In other roguelikes–take, for instance, my introduction to roguelikes, a game called Rogue Legacy–there is a hub world, so to speak, but all of the story takes place within the dungeon itself, in a way that doesn’t really ever bleed out into the hub, let alone tell most of the story within it. In other games, say The Binding of Isaac, there’s no hub world at all, and the dungeon has to tell the whole story. This is why the House of Hades is so fascinating: it allows parts of the story to be told within the roguelike escape attempts, but takes other parts of the story and tells them itself through interactions with other characters, those interactions themselves an unusual fixture in the normally-solitary roguelike genre.
This, in the end, is a double-edged sword of sorts. Say someone were to do the highly improbable, and beat Hades within the first couple of attempts. (Note that this was not something I had to worry about when playing.) How much of the story would they be missing out on? How many interactions with the world of Hades would they not have access to on that file? Would there be a noticeable enough loss of content for it to be considered a punishment for playing too well?
Here is a link to a video from IGN of Hades’ developers watching a speed runner completing the game on the first run. The section I attached actually mentions that the developers prepared a special piece of dialogue for people who are able to complete the game on the first run (https://youtu.be/VKepf4jyn4o?t=1245) . So in some ways, those (myself included) that are not able to complete the game in one run are also being punished for not being good enough to achieve this feat.
Oh, that’s cool! …And the only way I’ll be able to learn about that dialogue for quite a while, I get the sense.
I don’t have any issue with only the best players being able to see special dialogue; it’s a great reward for a nigh-impossible task. The only thing I think is weird is the idea that players can be punished for playing too well–it’s something I’d expect from an art game or meta-game like Stanley Parable, but Hades is such a (for want of a better term) normal-feeling game that a mechanic like that would appear very out of place.