The Welcome To Hell update makes Hades harder OR easier

Hades, the roguelike game about running away from your home in Hell, has released a new update today. This one is called "Welcome To Hell" and despite the name, adds ways to make the typically frustrating genre harder or easier.

Supergiant Games' latest has been in early access on the Epic Games Store for just under a year and the Welcome To Hell update is just the latest of many chunky additions. This summer it got a final battle and Steve Hogarty was already quite impressed with Hades before all the patches began rolling in. As with any roguelike, Hades has you fight monsters with increasing difficulty until you die (or even if you don't) and then tells you do do it all over again. And again.

Welcome To Hell adds two additional difficulties to the game, "God Mode" and "Hell Mode," which work about how you would expect. Hell Mode is a more challenging difficulty "for veterans of the cycle of death & rebirth," say Supergiant. God Mode is more forgiving. If you happen to be someone who really enjoys Supergiant's other games and you also happen to be very bad at roguelikes and you just so happen to be me, now might be a great time to give it a spin again, you coward.

Say what you want about easy difficulty modes in games, but I just couldn't be bothered to beat my head against the walls of Hell in Hades when it first released the way I can muster endurance for something like Dark Souls. God Mode may be exactly what I need to take another crack at Hades and actually enjoy it with my limited time.

The Welcome To Hell update is a large one with plenty of other changes. Supergiant note that this patch brings "more new narrative events & voice lines than any previous update." You can also commission the House Contractor to add furnishings to the underworld that boost the effectiveness of pickups found in each run. Your protagonist can now also find a special parchment that lets you fulfill the prophecies of the Fates for a reward. This still just skims the surface of what's been packed into the newest update to Hades.

You can read the line-by-line patch notes on Supergiant's blog. Or, as is now apparently tradition, you can listen to Supergiant's voice man Logan Cunningham read them to you as the narrator of Hades.

Hades has been exclusive to the Epic Store for a year where you can currently grab it for $24.99. With that exclusivity deal expiring, it's emerging onto Steam next week on Tuesday, December 10th.