Hades II Grief

I’ve plateaued while progressing through my own virtual Hell.

I’ve reached an ungraceful leveling in my Hades II playthrough. I’ve become too advanced to make the reaching of Olympus’s peak upon slaying Typhon, or brother Zagreus’s mirror upon defeating Chronos, significant enough to advance the story on its normal difficulty; yet, not quite adept enough to complete either task with difficulty-enhancing so-called “fear” constraints. Still, night after night, I plunge ahead, unsure of the why but beholden to the repetition.

My Steamdeck has logged 20 hours in the last two weeks, and 208.3 hours of total playtime since October 1, 2025. This is likely an underestimate, though I’m unsure why Steam’s time log and data syncs between my desktop and Steamdeck are never quite exact. No matter: 208.3 hours of plunging through procedurally-generated levels of underworld, scratching and clawing with whatever meta/physical tools my Melinoë can get her hands on, searching for the solution to her godly familial dispute that, spoiler for this piece, I have yet to find. There is still a delight to this looking. Pairing hearth goddess Hestia’s fire boon with Thanatos’ scythe; equipping brilliant-weaver-turned-spider Arachne’s silk scarf, which provides an ever-growing shield as you move through each location; selecting the right animal familiar to guide you on each night’s journey. And on each night, with whichever cat, bird, dog should be alongside, only ever intermittently engaged in combat but nevertheless persistent in presence, you know you will lose. You know you both will die, will return to shadow—and you move forward anyway.

“I fear the fear has inverted.”

After 208.3 steam-powered hours, I have reached a maladroit plateau in my Hades II campaign. I know enough to court Poseidon first: to have prepared well enough spiritually, Arcana shuffled to allow for as many chances to land the Sea Star boon as possible. But this run is doomed by a series of unlucky door openings, my aging thumbs losing springiness—or simple bad luck. But in the waves and waves of repetition: of monsters procedurally sent to bring about my demise; the fighting of my inevitable demise; of demise—I find an odd comfort. It drones against the spontaneously violent background of our shared lived reality.

 I’ve reached a flattening in my grief. The overwhelming majority of the 208 hours, 20 minutes of my time in game developer Supergiant’s Hades II, occurred in the time since the gradual passing of my aunt, and the very sudden death of my dog. The first, a gradual and grotesque descent caused by dementia; the latter a silently simmering, then suddenly bursting, cardiac episode. In airports on the way to funerals, in empty cars on the way back from emergency rooms, and, especially, at the quieter, colder underside of my desk, I found myself plunging into a different kind of death; this one procedurally-generated, this one physically painless, this one enmeshed in a kind of familial chaos that would never look at me and claim kin. A death detached from the two I navigated in my own life.

I am deeply afraid of flight and am often dismayed at its seeming inevitability as a principal method of transportation. Whether for work, or because of increasingly frequent local emergencies, I have found that it is not always an option to simply not want to board a plane. I adopted the practice of exposing myself to plane crashes, or flying itself, as much as possible before an upcoming flight. I would watch plane crashes on YouTube, write out scenarios of my own peril in a downed airbus, and would even play Microsoft Flight Simulator to fly the route of my upcoming trip, hoping to desensitize myself as much as possible. I’ve realized that since late October, I have been trying to use Hades II as, allegorically, an exposure response prevention (ERP) therapy discipline. I fear I have been failing, and am still just as sensitive to death, if not steeled further still to trite violence.

I fear the fear has inverted. I fear the exposures into this fictional death realm, new introductions brought about only by more dying, has made me more apprehensive. I no longer choose Hecuba, the dutiful black dog, as my animal familiar. I avoid the cat as well, so as not to tempt future calamity. Frinos, a green frog who absorbs foe’s incoming ranged attacks, hops along intermittently, neon lime skin and wide globular eyes endearing in their unfamiliarity. Frinos would never remind me of the grief, familial or otherwise, I’d navigated with a familiar at my side, as eager for my affection as they were to reciprocate.

I fear I have reached the asymptote for the usefulness of these descents into afterlife. Of course grief is not a linear maze to navigate. And of course the drugs work, as does the sunlight and the filtered water. And, of course, we all will have our turn to go cold, with no say in the when. But the anxieties persist. I anticipatorily mourn my inability to remember or recognize my loved ones, brain addled by the Alzheimer’s that sticks to my folks’ blood like sugar. I close my eyes and watch my good sweet long-legged baby boy collapse and tumble down the hardwood stairs, then into my arms, and then into a place I cannot fathom. I fear I have reached a point in my run with grief where the boons—the weed, the SSRI, the mindfulness exercises—feel conscripted to a fate of ineffectiveness. And on these runs I no longer have my animal familiar.

 It is easier today than it has ever been to watch someone die on the internet. High-profile, public killings are not just common, but commonly caught in the watchful gaze of our behemoth surveillance state. The police kill people on camera. ICE agents kill people on camera. Masked vigilantes kill big pharmaceutical CEOs on camera. Snipers kill right-wing agitators and before we know who pulled the trigger or what the motivation was, we can see, if we want, the light dim from someone’s eyes, their body stiffen into past-tensed object. We are inundated with the taking of life and personhood. And still, I wept like a child at the death of my aunt. And still, the loss of my dog, Panch, keeps me awake at night, surrenders my appetite, has introduced a paranoia into my living that I can feel on the surface of my skin. A life is plundered by the state and I sob at the finality of another’s loss, more than the violent plundering itself. I fear that I have known nothing but trite violence in my thirty-two years of being and so, while unsurprising I would turn to it in repetition, it is ultimately an unnatural place to look for solution.

“ I fear, unfortunately, this piece will reach a plateau.”

 I fear, unfortunately, this piece will reach a plateau. I still find myself, as I write this, looking for solutions to the incalculable grief. There aren’t any. There is only repeated movement. This, if anything, is the wisdom I’ve inferred from the game, and the rogue-like genre itself. While rogue-likes are known for their punishing difficulty, and instituting a so-called “grind” that, once overcome, pays off euphorically. And a lot of that is what attracted me to Hades and its sequel, and other titles like Rogue Legacy 2 or Balatro. But while there is virtue in the triumph, so too, is there in the treading of water. There is value in meandering. There is something to be congratulated about ambulation. In being in movement and in relation. To be unfixed. My grief, a familiar itself, becomes tethered to this movement, rather than something to be overcome. And while that everlasting grief is often framed as a given fact—that it is something to live alongside, rather than around or past—playing Hades II for the last several weeks, in a rut in my gameplay experience and in my processing of personal loss, has reminded me of how it can feel to move, monotonously and repetitively, alongside the grief.

 I’m in the midst of a flat, open expanse. In my head, there are throngs of people on a black sand beach. They have all, too, lost. We mourn together. I picture myself, not alone in the grieving, another mindfulness technique my partner learned in therapy, and in turn imparted to me. I open my eyes. I am on the carpet floor of my basement, space heater blowing warm kisses on my toes, cat curled nonchalantly at my splayed hand. My dog is still dead. The others are upstairs sleeping, or crying, or both. I roll my tongue in my cheek, taste the copper and cotton. Fingers slightly numb and in a shimmering veneer of sweat. I know enough to know I have had a panic attack, enough to know what to do to steady the boat before it tips; to know how, if I must, to tread once I find myself capsized, drowning in beige shag. I know enough to know that there is only the option of continuing to move. I rise. I rinse my mouth out in the basement bathroom sink. I check the clock to confirm we still are at an hour where one can more covertly collapse into despair. Awake, hands buzzing like angered hives, I boot up Hades II, unsure of the why, but comfortable in the repetition.