Waffling Taylor's Lite: the pocket size podcast that packs a gaming punch.

In this serving of bite sized banter with a side of gaming goodness, we catch up with Matthew Bliss, creator of podcasts From My Home to Yours and Dead Drop Game News about Hades.

Take it away, guys

— Squidge

I am Matthew Bliss. I have featured on a couple of episodes for the the the Waffling Taylors podcast.

...But yeah, I'm delighted to be back on again in this nice little Lite edition. Hopefully I can be as much of a joy in your ear holes as Squidge is normally.

And yeah, this whole podcasting gig, it's something I've been doing for a couple of years myself. As Squid struggles to retain his liquids, he's just imbibed. I've had a few podcast on the go. My current project is one with my wife actually having just moved from Australia to Ireland. We've done a podcast about the move called From My Home to Yours and we share our emotions and experiences and all that kind of stuff. I've also had the one that brought me onto the Waffling Taylors I think was the Dead Drop podcast or Dead Drop Game News, which has been on hiatus for an unanticipated long time, though as you can imagine, me being away or trying to move to Ireland for as long as I have it has had to take a backseat. But I'm looking to bring it back.

So make sure that if you want to follow along with me and if you like what you hear in this episode, then yeah, from My Home to Yours or Dead Drop Game News.

— Matt

Look, it's really hard to know.

As you said, Hades is one of those games that you just have to try and you get addicted to. You absolutely do. But you do have to take a bit of time to master it. So the first time round, and it was many years since I played it, it was a game that went into early access first, and I think I got it just before the early access window finished and it went into version one. So I've been playing it for a while. I think it probably took me like 20 hours to surface just because it is such a it's hard to describe the difficulty.

It's kind of like a Dark Souls thing where you play a game enough and you find yourself learning how to play it, and then you describe it to someone else and you struggle to find why it's so hard for them to do what you can do, but have spent 30 hours trying to having to learn yourself. It's definitely one of those skill based games. It is a rogue-like, though, so it is run based. So however many runs it takes you to get to the surface and the keep getting to the surface over and over and over again is the whole nature of the thing. But there's always plenty to learn in there. And that's where the 80 hours comes from.

This is something I forgot to check before we started this recording, but I've actually bought the game twice. I bought it on the Epic game store for PC. That was when it was in early access, and that was one of the secrets they had, too: it was only available on the Epic Store at the beginning. They did an exclusive deal with that for the first year, I think. And then it started to become available on other platforms.

But I'm just loading up the window now. So I've currently got 223 and a half hours on PC in Hades. And I have no idea how many hours I've played on switch because I don't know if there's a way to tell, but I would say it's probably about the same. I found that the rogue-like is excellent in a handheld, so Hades really suited that well for me

— Matt

Well, it's a funny confluence of things.

The big mention here is Super Giant Games that developed it. The have been on a trajectory for probably the last ten years, I'd say at least prior to the release of this game because ... all their games are of a similar aesthetic. You started off with Bastion - I think that was back in the Xbox 360 days, xbox 360 Arcade or whatever it was. Then you had Transistor, which was a different game again. And then Pyre, which is another different game, but again similar aesthetic. And then they have Hades to round that out. And if you haven't heard of any of the three preceding games, that might be for good reason because it's kind of a tale of them learning everything they needed to learn to get to the stage of Hades where they created almost the perfect game, or at least it seems like the perfect game.

...

It's one of those games where you pick it up and it takes maybe half an hour and then you realize, "oh no, I can't put this down, this is going to be a problem for me." And I've done that a couple of times with games. Sometimes it's a delight to find that out, sometimes it's true and utter terror. For example ... Marvel Snap - that's the one. That one I played for like maybe half an hour. In fact, I've tried it twice for half an hour and each time I've gone, "sorry, I have to uninstall this because it's going to be way too addictive for me." Hades is very much the same, except it's got a longer-than-five-minute window investment. Like each run could take two minutes or it could take 45 minutes. So when you get enough skill, you can invest more time in there.

— Alyxa