Hades, Supergiant Games’ award-winning 2020 roguelite, was renowned for its excellent combat, beautiful art style, entrancing music, and very, very hot characters. You’d expect a game about Greek gods (who were purposefully attractive so that the normies of Ancient Greece had something to aspire towards) to include a ton of hot characters, but Hades managed to exceed expectations. And from what we’ve seen of the Hades II technical test and Supergiant’s latest gameplay stream, it looks like the sequel will be even hotter. Take that, cancel pigs.
Despite what certain corners of the internet might believe, there isn’t a lack of attractive people in modern video games—Baldur’s Gate 3 just set a GOTY award record, and that game was full of hotties. But when compared to something like Stellar Blade’s Eve, the standard bearer for the latest gamer culture war, the manner in which Hades depicts its characters (and their attractiveness) is fundamentally different.
Understanding Hades’ hotness
Hades characters’ sexiness is woven into their personalities, as much a part of them as their wants, needs, and emotions—and their bodies, however scantily clad or salacious, are not in motion, they cannot be manipulated or posed or peered at from different angles. Instead, it’s like you’re looking at statues or paintings of these gods and their eternal, infinite sexiness. There is desire here, sure, but there is also power and reclamation, there is longing because you only get a tiny little taste of their beauty. The concept of “look, but don’t touch” is incredibly sexy—it’s part of why strip clubs, many of which have strict rules on touching the performers, are so lucrative.
Conversely, as Issy Van Der Velde writes for Inverse, a character like Stellar Blade’s Eve (like Lara Croft before her) is hot, but she doesn’t seem to be aware of it: “she’s sexy but doesn’t know it; she’s athletic and acrobatic but entirely controllable.” She is a blank slate, a poseable sex doll, her bountiful chest heaving during idle animations. Unlike Bayonetta, whose sexiness is folded into her personality and fighting style, Eve is just blandly attractive. Eve is the object of desire, not the owner of it.
In Hades 2, everyone is horny for each other, and thus it feels far less leery and creepy for us as players to be horny for them, too. These are sexual people, gods who are infamous for their rampant and often unchecked desires. Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love and beauty, would be naked and have pink hair down to her ass crack, and the wry smile she wears in her character photo implies that she knows you’re hoping the one perfectly placed tendril over her nipple would shift ever-so-slightly.
But while Aphrodite embodies a more traditional idea of sexiness (which, by the way, is subjective—look at how many of us are thirsting over Walton Goggins’ noseless Ghoul in the Fallout TV series), Hades 2 includes all different kinds of hot. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, there is a variety of sexiness on display here, from the burly bearness of Hephaestus (whose presence here suggests a more inclusive approach to body types than seen in the first game), to the muscle momminess of Hecate and Nemesis. There is a smorgasbord of sexiness on display, not a singular, decidedly straight male-oriented take on attractiveness.
Hades 2 offers us an extensive collection of finery, a lengthy CVS receipt of thirst traps, horny character models for horny characters who have ownership over their beautiful bodies. It is exactly the kind of hot that we need right now, and I can’t wait to see more of it. The Hades 2 technical test is currently accepting signups on Steam, and the Early Access release will come soon after. Stay hydrated, kids, it’s gonna get hot in here.
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