Came back to the game today for the first time in a couple weeks and got to Hades for the first time…very exciting! Got him to quarter health with the gun before he killed me.
I’m enjoying the gun yet I felt I didn’t feel I had quite enough damage to have a good go at the last boss. Any boon recos for it? Something with knock away effects is my best bet?
I think when I went all the way with Exagryph I went ham with Aphrodite boons and got a bunch of Weak stacks
For the gun, I think anything with stacks works best - Hangover and the Ares boon that does increased doom damage for stacks. Then pair Dionysus/Ares/Aphrodite etc for the mirror talent that does +40% damage on two or more status effects. For defense/repositioning, Athena/Poseidon dash or Hermes bonus dashes.
I have become…somewhat unstoppable?
This is especially strange for me because I usually suck at roguelikes, but…I guess this one really clicked for me. GOTY for me, no question.
On my clears with the gun I remember almost using the special as its primary fire and its primary as a kind of finisher for low-health enemies. Primarily with a hammer that turns the special from an arcing bomb into a rocket that follows a straight line, because that just destroys everything.
I like that hammer upgrade, as well as the one that turns the special into 3 shots, and another that turns it into 5 shots. Along with stacking curses, it’s unstoppable.
I never found an upgrade for the rail’s Special I clicked with, but I’ve combined the aspect for the rail that gives it extra power on manual reload with an Attack upgrade that makes the main a burst fire… basically just turns the Rail into a shotgun and it is very powerful. I like that with the Ares boon for an extra big chunk of damage.
Generally the rail isn’t my favourite but I once had the triple special I believe with Ares’ doom boon and a powerfully upgraded festive fog cast from Dionysus and I was like mobile artillery. It was dope.
I’m sincerely a bit jealous of people who are good at this game 
The rocket is so damn good because it largely scratches the delay on waiting for the special to connect. One of my faves for that weapon.
After my success playing Pyre hands-free I decided to jump in the deep end and start Hades. This game is…good. It’s not like I doubted the hype or anything, Pyre is probably one of my favorite games after all, it’s just a bit different experiencing it first-hand especially since I haven’t watched many gameplay videos or streams or anything.
I’m going to try to chronicle my experience playing it hands-free with a video every few days or something. Partly I really want to help Parrot.py get more visibility, I genuinely thought I would never play this game so it’s kind of incredible I was able to jump in after dictating a handful of Python code, but also figure it might be a fun way to end the year. I’m basically going in totally blind, so it’s been fun discovering things (like I didn’t even know I would need to support holding down attack buttons).
Tonight I fought Megaera for the first time but died to a spike trap. My noise recognition model needs some work, I managed to tune things so I can more reliably trigger the special, but I’m still getting some missfires.
I’ve put over 100 hours into this game (on Switch) now - it’s possibly my game of the year. The only downside is that I have to stop sometimes because my hands start to hurt.
No joke, after playing for about 15 hours last weekend I really had to dial it back this weekend because I was straining my vocal cords 
It took me just over 50 attempts to get my first win against Meg, and then another 10 for my second. I can tell that I’m getting better for sure, but it’s very slow progress. I may swallow my pride and turn on god mode… I certainly appreciate that they included that option and that it doesn’t seem to have any impact on achievements or anything else, but the more I think about it, I wish the game had the kind of granular difficulty options that Invisible Inc has.
I think my considered opinion is that it’s odd / a missed opportunity that Hades doesn’t have an inverse of the Hard mode granular difficulty increase options for God mode. (Especially since Transistor did have a sort of mirrored set of both kinds of modifications to gameplay).
That’s a great point, I didn’t really know much about that higher difficulty stuff. Apparently the game is fairly open for modding so could be an opportunity for something… I started looking into it briefly because I was hoping there was a way to hack the control scheme, that’s my other big complaint. Unfortunately that stuff seems to be at a lower level of the code. I really wish it had the same free form click to move like Pyre.
Still really like the game, just wish I could play it more, and more easily.
Got my first clear yesterday after 43 tries (well probably 50 after bailing on some runs) and am quite pumped to get more. Regarding the pact of punishment stuff, is that something you have to interact with right away? I’d like to get clears with all the weapons before screwing around w/ difficulty.
Nope, you only need to turn it on when you want to start getting resources again with weapons you’ve already cleared with.
@mundanesoul is right but Extreme Measures can be really really fun because it changes around sone familiar encounters.
FYI the patch for cross save and all the PC updates are now live on the Switch!
Beat this for the first time the other day. Went very quickly from feeling like I could never beat Theseus and Asterius to getting to Hades every run. I wonder if I will get to the point where I also beat Hades every run. I don’t really like that fight very much. I would like to see more of the story but I guess I wish the last fight would be half as long.
