-Quick Review-
Hades is a lesson in patience and persistence. It’s lining up the “Skill”, “Luck”, and “Experience” circles in a Venn diagram. If you’ve got more skill and luck, you’ll make progress faster. If you’ve got more luck and experience, you can compensate for skills or natural aptitude. And if you’ve got no luck, you can still grind your way to success with developing skills and getting experience playing the game (Best of all as you grind you’ll level up skills which literally improve you luck, so even an poor unlucky soul like me can get some of that luck-o-matic-magic).
Hades is a Roguelite Action RPG developed by Super Giant Games and released in 2020; I’ve loved everything about Hades, from its music to its gameplay, to its voice acting, to its theming and art style, and I can easily recommend the game to pretty much anyone!
I had been busy working on other games, and suddenly I noticed a good Sale for Hades, and I told my wife “Hey, this is a must buy game”. Then I promptly started streaming it on Twitch. While everyone is over there having fun playing Hades 2, I’m back here playing Hades 1 …and living my best life!

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/s3fZnFaEHvw

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: The story just tosses you right in. You’re playing as Zagreus the son of Hades, as he attempts to escape the various layers of the underworld and make it to the surface. Zagreus will fight his way through Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx.
In all likelihood your first run will be unsuccessful… correction; it would be incredible and unbelievable to successfully escape on your first run with zero experience in the game. Expect to fail, expect to fail a lot. But after every run you’ll return to the Hall of Hades to get dialogue and exposition from the narrator and various colorful characters to fill in the background of who Zagreus is, and why he’s hellbent on getting to the surface.
I intentionally want to avoid talking about specific story details because uncovering the story bit by bit is another extremely rewarding experience from your subsequent playthroughs. The important story detail to remember is this: even when I failed an attempt, I went back to the beginning and had new character interactions, new stuff to unlock, and a fresh run with a fresh change to try mixing different boons and upgrades together to see what kind of smorgasbord-soup I could cook up.
Hades’ story kept my attention the whole time, sure it’s disappointing when I lose on a run that I was so certain I was going to succeed! But after a loss I’d just dust myself off and give it another try, again, and again.
And the pay off after you successfully fight your way through the game to get to the end… was one of the most dopamine-rewarding experiences I’ve had in a long time. And then you restart from the beginning again! I needed to take a break after that first one because I wasn’t emotionally ready to do it all over again to get more story. But as a word of encouragement: remember Zagreus gets more and more upgrades to help make the successful escape attempts more and more likely.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3582640942

Gameplay: Hades is played from an isometric view and has some hack and slash inspired combat elements to it. You have a Primary attack which is your basic damage dealing move, A Secondary Attack called a “Cast” which is unique and changes with different god’s boons and is limited in how many “cast” points you have, each weapon also has a Special Attack which will change drastically based on the weapon, and lastly there’s also a Dash move to quickly side step attacks, jump through barriers, and you can also attack while dashing!

My first experience playing Hades was clearing the first set of levels until promptly being destroyed by the first boss. Then went back to the Hall of Hades and spent my darkness to get permanent upgrades, unlocked new weapons with my keys, and then dived right back into it with another escape attempt… I continued to fight to get to back to that boss and dying to it several times until I got a good run where I beat the boss, then rinse and repeat on the next zone fighting my way out of the underworld until after 24 hours total gametime and roughly 35 attempts, I got my first successful escape!

The underworld is said to be in constant flux, and chambers will move around so each time you play you’ll encounter different chambers from the last time you visited. You’ll find chambers which reward you darkness, coins, keys, god boons, skill levels, the Hammer Artifact which improves your weapon somehow, and more.
You walk into a chamber, clear it of hostile NPC’s, pick up the reward, and move on to the next chamber (sometimes you also get a choice of which chamber you want to go to next, that’s how you make your “build”).
As usual for this game, just when you get used to running from chamber to chamber, you’ll get a new upgrade and now you gotta look for the shiny gold vases. Just when I got comfortable with a boss the boss changes slightly and gets new attacks… Hades just keeps incrementally adding new stuff. It's truly amazing how well paced everything is!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3620098581

Conclusion: As I said at the start of this review: I can easily recommend Hades to pretty much anyone! Hades is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I’d absolutely put it on my top 10 list if I made top 10 lists.
There hasn’t been any game Supergiant has put out that I haven’t loved, but Hades has blown me away, the story was engaging, the gameplay was compelling and enjoyable, I will be playing the music from the game for the rest of my life, and as bonus points Hades has extremely good replay value and lots of ways to add extra challenge to the game! If you haven’t played Hades yet, you should absolutely give it a shot. I'm confident you’ll agree with me on how great this game is.

-Quick Review-
I’m resisting the temptation to make the joke about how “PEAK is Peak”.
PEAK is a climbing game, it’s best experienced cooperative with friends, however you can play by yourself too… but with voice proximity chat, extra hands, extra inventory space, sharing the load, huddling together for warmth, pulling up a friend that extra couple of inches when their stamina runs out, PEAK really is more geared towards a cooperative experience where you summate the mountain together.

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/My1nu_XeBxc

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: You are a scout… I mean obviously you are a scout, but I mean in the game you play as a Scout. Kinda like “Boy Scouts”, “Girl Scouts”, “Junior Woodchucks”, or “Junior Chipmunk”, go on hikes, learn how to tie square knots, camping, sit in a classroom and do underwater basket weaving… if that last example seems odd, it’s because my time in boy scouts wasn’t stellar.
Anyway, you’re all on a troop adventure and… …Oops! Looks like the plane crashed and only you and your friends survived. It’s up to You and maybe Huey, Dewey or Lewy (friends sold separately) to make it to the PEAK where some idiot lost all of the flares to summon the helicopter to escape. But to get to the Peak… ahh, that’s where the story truly is.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3532803580

Gameplay: For a game about hiking… There's a fair bit to explain about the gameplay.
First thing you should know is if you want to climb something you walk to a tree, rock, wall or something, click and hold the left mouse button to climb. General movement is with WASD, and when you’re climbing WASD translates to the wall the same way, W is up, S is down, D is right, and A is left.
After movement is figured out, the next concept which is CRITIALLY important to master is Stamina. It’s definitely a case of “Easy to Learn, Hard to Master”, at the bottom left of the screen you have a stamina bar, once this bar empties you stop climbing and start falling, if the gods of PEAK really hate you, the mountain will slope away and you’ll just fall thousands of feet to unceremoniously hit the floor and bounce once before you drift into unconsciousness.
So you want as much stamina as possible, right? Right! But it’s more complicated then that. Things eat away at your stamina bar, like poison, injuries, burning, freezing, weight from items in your pockets or backpack, and hunger too literally takes chunks out of your stamina bar.

Some food items, or cooked food, or Campfire checkouts will give you bits of a second stamina bar. This second stamina bar is “Bonus Stamina”, if you use up your normal stamina you’ll dip into these reserves which are quite literally CLUTCH. That being said, try not to use bonus stamina unless you need too, everything on peak becomes an exercise in weighing the risks vs rewards…
Do you want to use your bonus stamina to clear this part, and then drop a role for your friends? Or do you want to use a rope cannon and save your bonus stamina? Maybe you don’t have much to work with at all and you should try looking up another side of the mountain… for a potentially easier path? At the end of the day that’s where the real challenge in PEAK is, it’s planning and using your tools effectively and efficiently.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3560585795

Conclusion: PEAK is really fun! The MESA update was… frustrating. Sometimes you’ll get a generated seed which is just god-awful, and you get to quit the game sad on that day… but you can know tomorrow there’ll be a new generated seed to try out and maybe that one will be easier?
On the whole PEAK has been a fun game, I look forward to any future updates the game might have. I can easily suggest the game for anyone looking for a cooperative game to play with friends. PEAK is very unique, I haven’t played any other game like it, and it’ll sit in my list of “favorite co-op games” probably for the rest of my life.