Hades, the First Video Game to Win a Hugo, and the Roguelike Genre — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #117

Super­giant’s Hades is now the first video game ever to have won a Hugo award for sci-fi/­fan­ta­sy fic­tion, and has set a new stan­dard in the Rogue­like genre, which fea­tures rel­a­tive­ly short “runs” through a ran­dom­ly-gen­er­at­ed dun­geon (or some equiv­a­lent) with per­ma-death, i.e. you die, you go back to the begin­ning. Gen­er­al­ly, these games are very hard.

Your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by three return­ing Pret­ty Much Pop guests: Psy­chol­o­gist of games Jamie Madi­gan, writer Al Bak­er, and musi­cian Tyler His­lop. In addi­tion to Hades, we talk about The Bind­ing of Isaac, FTL, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Dark­est Dun­geon, Curse of the Dead Gods, Way­ward, Risk of Rain, and more. What dis­tin­guish­es a Rogue­like from a Rogue-lite, and does it mat­ter? How are they dif­fer­ent than old-style arcade games? What makes Hades unique in the genre?

Read about Rogue­likes on Wikipedia. See IGN’s list of best Rogue­likes and TheGamer’s list of most dif­fi­cult Rogue­likes.

A few oth­er rel­e­vant arti­cles include:

• “One Year Lat­er, What 2020’s Best Game Actu­al­ly Was” by Niki Fakhoori
• “Hades is a near-flaw­less romp through hell after two years of ear­ly access” by Ryan Gilliam
• “‘Hades’ review: supergiant’s lat­est is, quite lit­er­al­ly, a god-tier game” by Dom Pep­pi­att
• “Here’s how ‘Hades’ makes going back to hell feel fresh” by Gene Park
• “How Hades Helped Me Under­stand My Dad” by Gra­ham Day

Fol­low @JamieMadigan, Al @ixisnox,  and Tyler @sacrifice_mc.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion fea­tur­ing all of our guests that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.