Describing Hades 2 makes it sound like shovelware

Hades 2 is a roguelite deckbuilderlite hack-n-slash dungeon crawler with farming mechanics, a fishing minigame, and yes - you can pet the dog.

It checks all the boxes of being a fantastically mediocre game. By description, it sounds like a color-by-numbers indie game. "You can pet the dog!" Cool, but are you bringing anything to the table?

It turns out, yes. It's actually quite good.

I hate roguelikes and deckbuilding mechanics, but I especially dislike when elements in a game feel like a checkbox afterthought meant to appease Reddit Froth.

So, it makes no sense for me to pick up Hades 2. I didn't even like Hades 1 that much.

Plus, Hades 2's gameplay is not all that special as far as hack-n-slash roguelikes go, but that's only because there are so many well-tuned roguelikes out there.

Hades 2 shines in being a vehicle for okay good art, nice good writing, but fantastically context-aware writing with top-notch voice acting.

(edits - clarifications)

Hades 2 is more of a storybook

Every run feels alive. You don't just enter a dungeon with procedurally generated encounters. Sometimes you meet Bimsley the Fucker or whatever, and it changes the mood of the entire run. And it turns out he's your uncle who helped your father kill a man in a back alley. Everything changes at (what feels like) a pretty satisfying pace.

You start a run not so you can reach two floors deeper or so you can grind giblets, you start a run because you might see some sexual tension between the main character and Blorbo the Slimer. You hope they become girlfriends.

There is so much unique dialogue in this game, and I've not ran into one instances where the dialogue came off strange or funny by accident. That's the really technically impressive part of this.

HADES GOTY? LLMs BTFO

The "promise" of txt2txt natural language models was in being able to generate appropriate dialogue on the fly, indefinitely, within the realm of the gameplay knowledge. It's a simpler problem to model what game state various characters would be privy to than it is to model that and write a lot of it by hand.

I think it's coming, and it's going to suck really really bad for awhile, before it becomes even kind of okay.

But the Hades 2 devs were able to create a game with seemingly endless context-appropriate dialogue anyways. It is very impressively cohesive. I think LLMs could be used to approximate the technological feat they've accomplished here within a few years, but definitely not the depth and soul of the writing. The Hades 2 devs have raised the bar for the quality of the writing and voice acting, even higher than they did in Hades 1.

(That said, this is a videogame, not a book. Temper your expectations.)

Hades 2 Has An Option for Me, the Hater

The best thing in Hades 2 is "God Mode". Remember at the top, when I said I don't like this genre? Specifically, I don't enjoy the core gameplay loop as much as you need to.

"God Mode" is the "I don't like this genre but I want to play the game" mode. I wish I activated it from the start. It reduces the number of times you run through the same content.

When you activate God Mode at any time, you a gain a 20% damage reduction, which grows by 2% each run, capping at 80% (or an optionally lower %). It's not nearly as powerful as the name implies.

Even though Hades II is much better than its contemporaries in the genre, I still quickly found it repetitive and grindy. One or two runs was enough for me, thanks. I need to do dozens?

If that sounds like a relatively minor boost, that's because it is. You still need to play the game, but it should tip the scales.

tldr?

Hades 2 is a sequel to Hades. Very good if you liked Hades but wanted more of Hades. Also, it has "God Mode", the "Hater's Delight", which I highly recommend if you don't like the idea of playing the same levels 50 times in a row, but maybe want to play them 10 times in a row.