Hades was almost Half-Glass Gaming’s 2020 Game of the Year. In a non-2020 year, it probably would have been, but in 2020, the world really needed the respite offered by Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As it turns out, New Horizons was the perfect game for 2020, and the most 2020 game of 2020, so it only made sense to make it our 2020 Game of the Year. But Hades would have been our pick had 2020 been a normal year.
And we’re not the only ones who loved it. It was the top-selling download-only Nintendo Switch eShop game for a while, and there were other folks who awarded it Game of the Year.
Despite this fact, I still haven’t played it. I think I might be the only person at Half-Glass Gaming who hasn’t played Hades, actually. And not only are my fellow Half-Glassers trying to get me to play it, but my friends who don’t write about games are trying to get me to play it as well. I’m being bombarded on all sides because of my Hades-less lifestyle.
Hades first came out as an Early Access title way back in 2018, but it didn’t get a 1.0 release (or a Switch release) until September of 2020. I was torn between that and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, which came out in North America that same month (it released in Japan in 2019). I knew both of these games would be massive time sinks, and I had to choose one or the other. I chose 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
I certainly don’t regret my decision. 13 Sentinels was another of the best games of 2020, and it was one that was tragically overlooked by much of the gaming world because of its visual-novel gameplay. I’m really glad I got to experience its weirdness. But that also means that I didn’t play Hades right away.
I eventually bought Hades on sale in the eShop, but then I realized I wasn’t going to be able to play it because my Switch was out of storage. At one point, I had an SD card, but it wasn’t a Nintendo-licensed one and it burned out, leaving me SD card-less. So now I’m dependent on the tiny amount of space on the console, and that space is full. Thankfully, I buy almost all my Switch games physically, so it’s not been a huge issue thus far. But after buying Hades, I wasn’t able to install it without having to delete something else.
So I didn’t play it.
For a long while, the question was floating around about whether Hades would get a physical release on Nintendo Switch, and I figured if it ever did, I’d be on board. Well, it did, and I ordered it. Finally, the game is here, and it’s part of my ever-growing collection of Nintendo Switch games.
Lovely, ain’t it?
And yes, this means I own two copies now (one digital, one physical). So now I don’t have an excuse to procrastinate. The game is in my home, and I have access to it.
Of course, I’m getting into NieR Replicant right now, and I also just picked up a fantastic little dungeon crawler called Dungeon and Gravestone, so I won’t get to Hades quite yet. But soon. Soon I will finally play Hades.
Just not today.
