Hades’ Godmode Is an Accessibility Feature
Roguelike games are an ever-popular staple of video games, with Hades being one of the newest. It chronicles the tale of the prince of the Underworld trying to make his daring escape to the world above. While the story and gameplay in Hades are amazing, there is one feature that seems to have gone overlooked: accessibility.
When it comes to gaming, the more people that play games, the better. More accessible games mean wider audiences can play them. In recent years, the gaming industry has seen a leap forward in accessibility improvements. The Last of Us Part II has over sixty configurable options, while the Playstation 5 has accessibility built-in for games to take advantage of. However, not all accessibility features are immediately apparent.
While Hades does not boast some of the fancier accessibility features from bigger games, it has one big one: Godmode.
Some people may simply see Godmode as an easy difficulty setting, but that is not so. While difficulty settings are an accessibility feature, Godmode goes further. Being a roguelike, players often die in Hades. Godmode does not change this; what it does do is make death more desirable. Every time you die in Godmode, your resistance to damage grows slightly. This means that even the shortest time spent alive is not wasted. For people with any of a large number of chronic conditions out there, this makes Hades no longer unplayable.
Whether a gamer has chronic nausea, pain flare-ups, or another symptom, any of these popping up at the wrong time can result in their death. In extreme cases, this can lead to someone not being able to progress more than one room before dying. While the usual advice given would be to get good at the game, this is not the solution here. Someone who deals with a chronic condition can not make it go away no matter how good they are at a game. So instead, Hades’ Godmode works with the fact that you are going to die.
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With Godmode enabled, every death ensures that you make progress. Whether you survive for one room or through the entire game, worrying about a sudden symptom onset no longer becomes such a problem.
As the gaming industry moves forward, hopefully, accessibility will as well. It’s not all about big, flashy options. Small changes in gameplay make a difference as well. Is there any feature in a game that makes it more accessible for you? Let us know in the comments.
As someone with polyneuropathy in my hands, gaming becomes more difficult over time. I applaud these kinds of features. Thanks to them I can continue my lifelong hobby for a while longer. Just fantastic.
I honestly disagree pretty strongly. Like I am glad that there are at least some considerations to accessibility in this game, and I love the theory of a mode that makes the game incrementally easier over time (as opposed to all at once with an “easy” mode), but in practice I didn’t find it all that helpful for a few reasons. First, I really wish there was a way to freeze it at a difficulty level or roll it back to make it slightly more difficult again. I have maxed out god mode and the game is significantly too easy now, but the normal mode is still too hard. I’d also love to see more granular options. Decreasing the damage you take is sort of the lowest hanging fruit in my opinion. I think it would work much better for me if it made the game slower instead. I want to be punished for my mistakes, I just want those mistakes to be harder to make in the first place. Additionally, a lot of features are time or timing based (fishing, countdown timer, Thanatos, certain perks and keepsakes) and making the player sturdier doesn’t help out with any of that. I have a disability that lowers my reaction time and makes rapid inputs like button mashing quite difficult, and god mode doesn’t help that at all. I have played all the Supergiant games and enjoyed them all (including Hades), but despite this game being the newest, it is the least accessible of the lot. It is definitely a step backwards.