Hades — ReviewEight thousand voiced lines and a narrative engine transform every death into story progression across six weapons, nine gods, and dual-track meta upgrades.

# Opening

A twenty-person indie studio, spending less than one percent of what The Last of Us Part II cost, ushered an isometric roguelike onto the DICE stage and walked out with the Game of the Year statue. It beat Ghost of Tsushima, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Last of Us Part II head to head. This is not marketing copy. This is what actually happened in Los Angeles on April 22, 2021.

The game is Hades. It takes the Greek myth of Zagreus, the rebellious son of the underworld lord, who walks away from his father, climbs to the surface and seeks the mother he was never told about, and shatters it into hundreds of failures, thousands of dynamic lines, tens of thousands of fresh attempts. Every death is not punishment but the next page of the script. That single design choice is its most uncopyable trait, and it is the surgical fix creative director Greg Kasavin applied to the lesson he learned from Pyre, which suffered low replay value with its linear endings.

Five years later, the game still sits at 94 on OpenCritic with 99% critic recommendation. It is the only roguelike in that company alongside The Witcher 3, Elden Ring, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Steam shows 98% positive across 276,000 reviews. BAFTA, GDCA, and the Hugo Award all delivered crossover honors, and total Game of the Year wins worldwide push past 70. Opening Hades again today is not just revisiting a roguelike — it is studying a template for how action and narrative can be fused.

# Story

Main arc: a son's defiant journey out of the House of Hades

At its core the game retells a Greek myth as a teenage runaway story. Zagreus grew up in the House of Hades, raised by Nyx the goddess of night, until one day he finds a redacted contract on his father's desk and learns that his real mother is Persephone, who left the underworld years ago. That single discovery becomes the engine that drives him to the surface and the spine of the entire narrative.

Every escape attempt sends the player from Tartarus through Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx, and ends in a duel with father Hades. The first time you arrive on the surface the punchline lands hard. Persephone was not imprisoned. She left of her own will and lives in a small cottage in eternal spring. The script is no longer "rescue mom," it becomes "let her tell you why she left." The story's real heart is how Zagreus pieces together the rift between his parents across ten, twenty, thirty conversations with her at the cottage.

Reaching the true ending requires defeating father Hades at least ten times, with new beats unlocking after each escape. The writing team drafted roughly ten hours of dialogue covering every plausible path. That structure of one big arc plus dense optional branches makes the loop of 30 to 50 successful runs feel like binge watching a slow burn drama rather than replaying a level.

Side quests: every NPC carries their own series

The House is not just a shop. Each resident comes with an independent storyline. Achilles is wracked with regret over Patroclus, who is stranded in Elysium, and the player must broker a reunion across dozens of conversations and a few key keepsakes. Megaera, the eldest of the Furies, was a prototype character from Pyre and here becomes Zagreus's former lover. The player chooses to rekindle, stay friends, or part ways for good.

Thanatos hides another deep arc. The death god is a childhood companion who keeps asking, gently and with restraint, why Zagreus insists on dying again and again. Orpheus is bound in the Great Hall singing Lament for Orpheus, and the player must collect clues to reunite him with Eurydice. Sisyphus, ever pushing his boulder, reflects on the theme of eternal futility and turns out to be a more nurturing father figure than Hades himself.

Each side line is bound to a unique keepsake — Megaera's "Bloody Whip Strand," Thanatos's "Pierced Butterfly," Achilles's "Lambent Plume" — and the keepsake also affects combat builds. The team purposely tied stories to combat hardware so that "grinding story without playing" is impossible.

Choices: no big branches, but plenty of attitude

Hades does not offer traditional RPG branching endings. The main path ends one way: reunite with mother, return to the underworld, reconcile with father, restart the loop. But each NPC line offers a clear attitude switch. Rekindle with Megaera or stay friends. Direct Aphrodite's romance Boons toward Thanatos or Dusa. Help Sisyphus brew his secret wine or refuse. Be kind to your father on the way home or stay cold.

These choices do not move the ending, but they reshape the entire House. Spend time with Thanatos first and Megaera's later lines start dropping subtle "you've been visiting Than a lot lately" callbacks. The studio practiced a behavior-log narrative — what you have done, who you have spoken to, what gifts you have given is logged and quoted back to you at unpredictable moments. Each gift to an NPC, each conversation choice, each successful Boon pickup gets baked into a private memory state that the dialogue engine consults whenever any character speaks. That state can resurface five hours later in a sentence you forgot was even possible, and the cumulative effect across a 60-hour playthrough is that the cast really feels like they have been paying attention to you the entire time.

Characters: a modern family drama in Greek dress

The Olympians are radically deconstructed. Zeus is not a distant tyrant but a slightly chubby uncle eager to brag about his thunderbolt. Poseidon never stops yelling "nephew." Athena is regal yet sneaks in protective Boons like an aunt's quiet kindness. The most affecting character is Hades himself — not a villain but a burned-out, emotionally illiterate middle-aged father wounded by his wife's departure. After the tenth surface run, when Zagreus returns and Hades clumsily asks "how is she," it lands as one of the most emotional beats in the entire game.

The performances earn the writing. Logan Cunningham voices Hades, Poseidon, Achilles, Charon and Asterius — five distinct timbres from a single actor. Darren Korb both composed the soundtrack and voices Zagreus, capturing the protagonist's easy wit, self-mockery and adolescent rebellion. That small-team, in-house casting gives the dialogue an intimacy you rarely get in AAA productions. Pair the voice direction with the writing and you get characters who feel like coworkers in a small workshop rather than abstract mythological figures in a textbook. The Olympians are not cosmic-scale beings here, they are uncles and aunts who happen to live in the sky. Hades is not the lord of the dead, he is a tired middle manager whose family fell apart. That intimacy is the secret sauce that elevates the whole production from a roguelike with a good story to a roguelike with characters worth replaying for.

# Audio

Score: metal guitar meets lyre over the Styx

Darren Korb's 22-track Hades soundtrack is one of the few roguelike scores you can pull out and listen to on repeat. The two most discussed cues are the Tartarus opener "Out of Tartarus" and the end-credits anthem "In the Blood," sung by Ashley Barrett, which has effectively become the theme song of Zagreus's defiant journey.

Every region carries its own musical identity while sharing a single motif. Tartarus is metal hardcore, Asphodel pivots to tribal percussion plus brass, Elysium leans heroic with Celtic flute and strings, and the Temple of Styx pulls choir and metal guitar together for a finale fit. Boss fights layer a thematic variation — Hades's battle music is the opening cue pitched up, BPM-compressed, with church organ stacked on top, making it clear to your ears that this is your father, not just another mob.

The five-year anniversary deserves a callout. Supergiant flew Korb and Barrett to Abbey Road Studios with the London Symphony Orchestra to re-record "In the Blood" as a full orchestral piece. That rarely happens for indie scores — it puts the track on the same shelf as Final Fantasy or Witcher classics.

Voice acting: 8000 lines, 20 actors, the studio steps up to the mic

The full script runs to about 8000 voiced lines. Instead of outsourcing to a major casting house, the 20-person studio called on a tight circle of long-time New York voice actors. Voice direction by Greg Kasavin sets a precise sonic identity for each character — Hades always roaring but with exhaustion bleeding through, Megaera carrying gravel in her fury, Thanatos restrained to the point of cool detachment, Dusa trembling with anxiety in every line.

Logan Cunningham almost single-handedly carries half the workload — Hades, Poseidon, Achilles, Charon, Asterius and the Storyteller narration. Each voice is distinct enough that listeners cannot easily tell it is the same actor. Darren Korb pulls double duty as composer and as Zagreus, a combination practically unheard of in mainstream development. The continuity between his musical themes and Zagreus's speech rhythms creates a kind of sonic glue that holds the entire production together.

PCGamesN noted in their review they "didn't hear a repeated line even after 50 hours." That illusion comes from the dialogue engine diluting the 8000-line corpus — the system dynamically picks the most contextually appropriate line based on current progress, weapon choice, keepsake selection and last death cause. Most of the time you encounter dozens of fresh lines per hour of play, and even when you do hit a line you've heard before, the surrounding context has usually shifted enough that the cadence feels new. That illusion of inexhaustible writing is the single most important reason players keep coming back run after run.

Environmental audio: each room breathes differently

Combat audio is another underrated layer. The hiss of Stygius slicing the air, the metallic ring of Aegis bouncing back projectiles, the taut creak of Coronacht drawing its string, the clanky chug of Exagryph firing — every weapon has an immediately recognizable sound print. Practically, that means when the screen is buried under projectiles, your ears can still triangulate whether a foe is a stationary ranged unit or a rushing melee bruiser.

Environmental sound is just as precise. Tartarus drips with subterranean echoes, Asphodel burbles with lava, Elysium carries the distant taunts of heroes, and the Temple of Styx hums with low-frequency chorus. Each region "breathes" at a different BPM, and the moment you cross the region threshold, the new mix tells you that you have changed acts. Five seconds before any boss fight, the soundscape thins out — all audio dims so your nervous system is ready for what comes next.

The hub is treated with equal care. The crackle of the hearth, Megaera sharpening her blades, Achilles softly reciting Homeric verses by the wall, Charon's distant rumble — each environmental layer is spatialized to the NPC location. Wear headphones and walk the hub, and the sound stage tightens directionally as you approach each character, giving them a real "presence" without leaning on a hub BGM. That kind of environmental hub design is exceptional even outside the roguelike genre.

Platform audio differences

PS5 and Xbox Series X versions support 3D audio, and headphones let you locate enemies by direction in the sound stage. In Tartarus's narrow corridors, the wing beats of a beetle approaching from behind ramp up frequency from left ear forward, and that stereo cue is critical for combat reaction time. Switch's handheld speakers physically cannot carry that spatial mix, so handheld fans should plug in wired or wireless headphones.

The PC version routes through the system audio stack, and surprisingly the Steam Deck's dual speakers are pleasant enough, while headphones unlock virtual 7.1. Anyone with a real 7.1 surround setup at home should switch the audio output mode to 7.1 — Zagreus's faint echo after each dash, the distant rumble that precedes a god showing up, all gain a different presence in multichannel. Across every version, the mix discipline holds: the BGM never overwhelms key combat cues, ensuring that when the screen is information-saturated, your ears can still steer you. The audio team also kept dynamic range tight enough that you do not need to constantly ride the volume knob — late-game boss roars and quiet hub conversations both land within a comfortable listening band, which matters a great deal for the long marathon sessions this game tends to encourage.

# Visuals

Art direction and character portraits

The visual style of Hades is almost a studio signature — thick lines, bold colors, dense shadows, somewhere between American comic art and Western iconography. Character portraits by Jen Zee come in two versions per character: a default pose and an intimate variant unlocked by maxing out the relationship meter. Push an NPC to peak affinity and their portrait quietly swaps to a softer, closer composition. The studio's "portrait as narrative" practice tells the story more directly than any text log could.

Combat art takes another route — every interactive element wears a fluid, luminous outline so that in a screen full of projectiles you can instantly distinguish bullets from terrain from pickups. When a god shows up mid-battle, a semitransparent portrait fades in alongside a full-screen light pillar, giving you enough beats to evaluate the three Boon options on offer. Recurring guests like Megaera and Thanatos who actively interrupt your run get full cameo intros — a half-second close-up, a signature line, a brief color shift across the arena — so the player snaps to "old friend just arrived" without parsing UI.

Engine technology and cross-platform performance

The engine is proprietary. Late in development the team rewrote the rendering layer from C# plus Microsoft XNA over to C++ on top of The Forge, primarily for cross-platform portability and long-term maintenance. The direct payoff is that PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X all hold 4K at 60 frames per second, Switch's handheld mode locks 720p at 60 with rare drops, and TV mode hits 1080p at 60.

Steam Deck users get a verified 1280x800 at 60 frames per second with 3 to 4 hours of battery life, putting Hades among the most stable Verified titles. On Nintendo Switch 2, the game runs in native compatibility mode and the player can enable 90 frames per second at 1080p handheld — a textbook case of an older title getting a second wind on new hardware. Anecdotal measurements from JP enthusiasts pin handheld Switch 2 power draw at about 6 watts on average, giving 3 to 4 hours of comfortable play.

The bigger picture is that Hades is the canonical "engine just needs to be good enough" case. There is no ray tracing, no DLSS, no HDR. Every performance dollar went into particle effects on every Boon and crisp telegraphs on every boss attack. That "art first, tech sufficient" stance, in stark contrast to many ray-traced AAA peers from the same era, is the underlying reason the game's visuals have aged so well.

Platform version differences

PC on Steam and Epic supports 4K plus 60 frames per second, mouse and keyboard plus full controller support, the default recommended path. PS5 and Xbox Series X run at 4K plus 60 frames per second with 3D audio and haptic feedback — the PS5 controller delivers a clear pulse on a successful Aegis block, telegraphing the defense window. Switch and Switch 2 are best in handheld; TV mode at 1080p is slightly soft but rock steady on frames. Xbox subscription holders can run the full game with zero extra cost.

There used to be an iOS version on Netflix's gaming service, launched in March 2024 and removed in July 2025 — a window of less than 18 months. The touchscreen port was actually mature, mapping shortcuts along the screen edges, using a virtual stick for Zagreus's movement and four dedicated buttons for attack, special, dash and cast. Handheld-focused players could pick it up within hours. But Netflix's gaming userbase was not big enough to justify long-term maintenance and it was eventually retired. The Mac version has been supported from the start, runs cleanly on M-series chips, and is one of the few macOS titles that delivers a console-grade experience.

UI and accessibility

The UI is another underrated touchpoint. All critical readouts — health, magic, current Boons, weapon aspect, prophecy progress — are tucked into the four screen corners, keeping the center combat zone clean. When a god shows up, a full-screen pause cards a "Boon" choice with three options side by side, each labeled with effect text, rarity, and compatibility with existing Boons.

For accessibility, Hades ships God Mode — a gradual difficulty reducer that lowers incoming damage by 2% per death, capping at 80%. It is essentially a soft assist for players who love the story but bounce off the combat. Colorblind players can swap projectile colors to clarify interruptable versus uninterruptable attacks. Switch handheld mode lets you scale subtitle size up to 1.5x, easing the small-screen reading pain — a small but meaningful gesture toward portable players. Beyond the headline accessibility features, the menus are uniformly readable, controller remapping is granular enough to satisfy left-handed players, and the in-game help system never feels like it is talking down to newcomers. Add up these touches and you get a game that is easy to settle into regardless of skill level, language background, or physical accommodation needs.

# Combat

Combat layering: six weapons, four aspects, twelve moves

The skeleton is isometric bullet hell plus invulnerability dash. Zagreus has four base actions — primary attack, special, ranged cast, and dash. Primary and special change with the weapon, cast is a magic-fueled clear button, and dash gives 0.3 seconds of i-frames. That four-button base is simple, but every weapon swap rewrites the entire moveset.

The six weapons are Stygius the Stygian blade, Varatha the eternal spear, Aegis the shield of chaos, Coronacht the heart-seeking bow, Malphon the twin fists, and Exagryph the railgun. Stygius is the beginner's choice with a three-hit combo and a wide sweep. Varatha shines at range, throwable and recallable. Aegis is defense and reflect, allowing aggressive blocking. Coronacht charges arrows for huge damage. Malphon brings fighting-game-style face-to-face chains. Exagryph maintains ranged DPS with full-screen magical bullets.

Each weapon has four "aspects." Stygius's aspect of Hera makes the cast deposit stacking curses; aspect of Poseidon turns each primary into a knockback wave; aspect of Arthur from the post-launch update grants infinite cleave with a damage trade. Aegis's aspect of Zeus enables long-range throws; aspect of Beowulf converts the shield into a "rush forward" charging tool. Across all weapons, twenty-four entirely distinct movesets exist. GCores's analysis calls this "unprecedented build density."

Boon system: nine gods, thirty Boons, multi-tier rarity

The nine Olympians — Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysus — each offer about thirty Boons across four rarity tiers: Common, Rare, Epic, Heroic, and the rare Legendary. Athena's "deflect" Boon lets you bounce projectiles back at the source. Aphrodite's "weak" debuff lowers enemy attack power. Ares's "Blade Rift" summons a stationary blade vortex that grinds anything inside.

What pushes the system into greatness is the 23 Duo Boons — hidden combinations triggered by specific pairs of god Boons. Zeus plus Poseidon triggers "Stormlightning." Aphrodite plus Ares unlocks "Curse of Longing." Artemis plus Athena yields "Lights of Dawn." These hidden combos are large enough that even at 200 runs many players have not seen them all. Every combination is essentially a new playstyle — you might be a teleport sniper this run, a shield bunker the next, a self-destructive berserker the run after.

Hermes operates as the dedicated "flow" school, providing attack speed, move speed, and dash recharge buffs. The Hermes Boon is jokingly called a "build savior" since any Boon picked into any build benefits from one Hermes assist. Demeter's frost school is the opposite — slow tempo, crowd control. Dionysus's poison hangover school is a damage-over-time route. Each god corresponds to a distinct martial school.

Mirror of Night and the Fated List: persistent growth and goal driving

Beyond combat there are two long-term progression spines. The Mirror of Night has 14 slots, each with two mutually exclusive options. The first slot, for example, asks you to choose between "regen 1% HP per new room" and "deal more damage at lower HP." Each option can be invested up to five tiers using Darkness currency. Maxing the entire Mirror takes dozens of successful escapes, the classic "meta progression" model. The cleverest aspect is that "mutually exclusive choice" — you must commit to a growth direction instead of stacking everything, making progression a soft character-build choice rather than a number ramp.

The Fated List is the other driver. Ten prophecies, each mapping to a story or combat goal — "win the favor of the six Furies," "unlock every weapon aspect," "renovate the House to its highest tier" — and the list auto-tracks player progress, marking the next step front and center in the hub. Most players hit the "what do I do now" wall around the 50-hour mark, and this prophecy system is the map handed to them. Each completed prophecy fires a unique cutscene and a large reward, usually Titan Blood or Chthonic Keys, giving the player a clear "completion loop" beat. Some prophecies even cross-reference each other so that completing one quietly nudges another into reach, which keeps the long-tail of the game feeling like a chain of small wins instead of a slog through busywork. Together the Mirror and the prophecies form a two-track engagement loop, one focused on building Zagreus into a better fighter and the other focused on building the world around him into a richer setting.

Difficulty curve and God Mode

The difficulty curve is gentle. New players bounce most often on the Tartarus Furies or Asphodel's hydra, and at that point the Mirror is barely upgraded. But every death banks 10 to 20 gemstones, darkness, Chthonic Keys and the like, so most players hold a clear line by the 5th to 10th attempt. Final boss Hades typically takes 8 to 15 tries before first clear, a rather lenient figure for a roguelike. From the first death to the first clear most players spend 12 to 18 hours, much smoother than Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy.

To fully open the gate, Hades ships "God Mode" — toggle it on and every death adds a 2% damage reduction stack, capping at 80%. That means even action-incompetent players can lock in a clean ending after 40 to 50 attempts — the narrative reward is not gated by combat skill. IGN China specifically praised this as "narrative-player friendly." Importantly, enabling God Mode does not block achievements or affect story completion. Every NPC relationship line, every ending, and every prophecy proceeds normally with zero clipping. That single design choice expanded the audience well beyond the genre's traditional hardcore base and helped Hades sell millions of copies to players who would otherwise never have tried a roguelike at all.

Cross-genre feel comparisons

Across the genre, Hades sits between Dead Cells, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth, and Slay the Spire. Dead Cells leans toward extreme hardcore with a high operational ceiling and tight tolerance — newcomers spend their first 20 hours getting executed. Isaac is approachable but feels coarse, with replays mostly driven by achievement chasing. Slay the Spire is turn-based and not directly comparable. Hades parks exactly in the sweet spot of "easy to start, high ceiling, generous tolerance, character driven," which is why it outsold its peers by millions of copies.

In finer comparison, Hades's bullet density is slightly higher than Dead Cells, but dash i-frames are longer and damage mitigation is friendlier. Compared to Isaac, room counts are tighter (12 to 20 per region versus 25 to 40) and pacing is brisker. Compared to Slay the Spire, Hades adds a real-time action layer, so build decisions shift from "deck stacking" to "real-time tradeoffs." That differentiation is what lets Hades court both hardcore roguelike players and traditional action RPG players, and is the key to its mass-market roguelike status.

# Content

Main story length and pacing

How Long to Beat reports the Hades main story at an average of 21 hours — the shortest path to taking down the final boss once. But the full experience demands "ten Hades defeats plus all ending unlocks," which raises the typical clear time to 30 to 50 hours. To finish every NPC line, collect every keepsake, and clear all 10 Fated List prophecies, expect 95 to 100 hours, putting Hades in rare company among roguelikes able to sustain triple-digit playtime. Break that 21-hour skeleton apart and the first clear of each region takes 4 to 5 hours of repeat attempts, the final boss usually 3 to 5 hours to first victory, with the rest split across weapon unlocks, resource grinding, and home renovation.

Pacing-wise a single roguelike run lasts 25 to 40 minutes. Tartarus can be cleared in 8 minutes when smooth, Asphodel's lava rooms drag closer to 10, Elysium's hero fights demand a careful 12, and the final 8 to 10 minutes go to Styx and Hades himself. That cadence is delightful for handhelds — commute, lunch break, and pre-bed slots can each hold a full run. This short-loop plus long-arc hybrid pacing precisely matches the fragmented time budgets of mobile-era players from 2020 onward. It is neither so short that it feels insubstantial nor so long that you cannot finish a run during a midday break.

Side content distribution

Outside the main path, side content breaks into four families. First is NPC relationship arcs — Megaera, Thanatos, Dusa, Achilles plus Patroclus, Eurydice plus Orpheus, and Sisyphus, each demanding dozens of interactions, keepsakes, and gifts. Second is god affinity — each of the nine Olympians has an affinity arc that unlocks a signature Legendary Boon at completion. Third is weapon unlocks and upgrades — each of the six weapons has four aspects with distinct unlock conditions. Malphon's Aspect of Zagreus, for example, requires unlocking the first two aspects and then spending 16 Titan Blood. Fourth is the House renovation — the player can use gemstones to renovate the hub through nine tiers, each tier triggering a rare warm moment between father and son.

The design beauty across these four families is that "nothing can be brute-forced alone." Megaera's arc, for example, requires both "meeting and defeating her in battle multiple times" and "gifting her the correct items in the hub." You cannot grind it via the hub conversations alone. Unlocking Hestia's aspect for Exagryph requires running a Hestia-themed Boon line, which in turn requires picking her in combat repeatedly. Every line is designed to require "combat plus relationship" in parallel, which structurally prevents the player from grinding out the game with a single behavior.

DLC weight and value proposition

Hades has no traditional paid DLC — everything is in the base game. The built-in Hell Mode is effectively a free DLC: with the Pact of Punishment system, players can stack up to 64 Heat points, each increasing difficulty, beefier enemies, and richer rewards. The hardcore challenge content extends an additional 30 to 50 hours. Steam global achievement data shows the share of players clearing Heat 32 and above hovers below 3%, a peak reserved for hardcore players.

The August 2022 cross-platform save update lets PC, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation players keep one save file across devices, a real bonus for long-term fans. In September 2025, in step with the Hades II 1.0 launch, the base game went 75% off on Steam and the Switch eShop and re-joined the Xbox subscription service. A title that gives you 60 to 100 hours of content for under ten dollars effectively sets the price-to-content ceiling for the roguelike genre, and is one of the most consistently recommended "evergreen entry pieces" in player communities over the last five years. The decision not to fragment content into paid DLC is itself a statement of values from the studio, and the long tail of free updates from launch through 2025 reinforces the message that this is a complete artifact you buy once and own forever.

Mod ecosystem

PC players get a third increment vector — the mod ecosystem. Supergiant released the official ModUtil integration tool in August 2022, legitimizing community third-party mods. Nexus Mods now carries hundreds of mods spanning new weapon aspects, new Boon combos, harder bosses, Chinese voice acting, and new character portraits, with combined downloads above two million. The most popular is the "Chinese Voice Acting" mod — a community project that re-recorded over a dozen voices (Zagreus, Hades, Megaera and more) using a mix of human actors and synthetic dubbing.

The mod ecosystem makes PC's long-term lifespan dramatically longer than console. For a hardcore roguelike player, the PC plus mod combination can stretch playtime to 200 to 300 hours — a number rarely matched even by mainstream AAA. Beyond content mods, performance mods also have demand — unlocking frame rate to 144, supporting wider aspect ratios, enabling borderless windowed mode and similar tweaks let PC high-refresh players squeeze a more modern visual feel out of a 2020 release. The fact that the developers actively encourage modding instead of fighting it has created a healthy creator pipeline, with multiple modders eventually joining indie studios or contributing to community-maintained translations across more than a dozen languages.