The controversy fed into much-needed debates on the boundary between poetry and song, but the question of what constitutes literature is much broader. Does it mean the same as it did in 1901 when the first Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded?

High and low culture

These questions date back far beyond 2016. In the late 1950s, a group of professors from the University of Birmingham founded a new interdisciplinary area of study, called cultural studies, in order to ask new questions: What was the role of TV and other mass media in cultural development? Is there a justification for distinguishing high and low culture? What is the relationship between culture and power?

These questions are all still relevant to current debates around literature. Often, the word “literary” is a status symbol, a seal of approval to distinguish “high” culture from more vulgar or less valuable “low” forms of culture. Comics, for example, were not invited to join the club until recently, thanks in part to a rebranding under the more respectable guise of “graphic novels”.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, literature displays “excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest”. It seems that an artist like Bob Dylan can take home the Nobel prize thanks to literature’s defining feature of “excellence of form or expression”, which is not strictly limited to the written word.

But how do we account for other language-based forms of expression? If performed works such as theatre or songwriting can be considered literature, where is the limit?

Word play: text-based video games

According to data from video game data consultancy Newzoo, more than 3 billion people play video games worldwide – almost half of the world’s population. In Spain alone, 77% of young people play videogames, making them a massively relevant form of culture. But what does this have to do with “excellence of form or expression”? To answer this question we have to look back several decades.

When the first video games were developed in the 1950s, two distinct genres emerged: one was action oriented (such as the pioneering 1958 game Tennis for Two), and the other more text based. The original written games, known as “interactive fiction”, were made up exclusively of text, and the player’s job was to read and make decisions that would determine the game’s outcome using a keyboard.

The inclusion of images in adventure games would not arrive until 1980, when Mystery House became the first “graphic adventure” game. These would reach their heyday in the 1990s: famous examples include the first two Monkey Island games (1990, 1991), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Full Throttle (1995), and Grim Fandango (1998), though there were many others. Despite technological advances, these games inherited several features from interactive fiction, including the predominant role of text.

The experience of playing one of these titles is not so different from that of a book: reading, pauses, the possibility of backtracking, and so on. The player spends most of their time in dialogue with various characters in search of information, stories, or even banter and jokes that are irrelevant to the game’s progress, much like footnotes or subplots.

Several classic adventure games even have direct links to literature: The Abbey of Crime (1987) is a Spanish adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, while the legendary insult sword fighting of The Secret of Monkey Island was written by science fiction author Orson Scott Card. In Myst (1993), the gameplay itself revolves around two books.

Literature on the screen: “story-rich” games

In more recent years, a new sub-genre of adventure games – known as “story-rich” games – has become popular thanks to independent creators and producers. In Papers, Please (2013), a border policeman in a fictional dictatorial regime deals with terrible moral dilemmas on a daily basis. In Firewatch (2016), players take the role of a forest ranger who investigates a conspiracy by walkie-talkie. In Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), the player must reconstruct a tragedy on the high seas with the help of an incomplete book and a peculiar compass. In all these cases, gameplay and visuals take a back seat to strong narratives.

A quintessential example is The Stanley Parable (2011), where the player takes the role of a worker in a strangely deserted office. They have to explore several corridors while trying unsuccessfully to interact with their surroundings, accompanied by the voice of an enigmatic narrator. Upon reaching a room with two open doors, the voiceover states that Stanley “entered the door on his left”.

The player can choose to follow the instructions or disobey, provoking the wrath of the narrator much like in the denouement of Miguel de Unamuno’s 1914 novel Fog, where the main character speaks directly to the author.

Read More: PlayStation unveils Community Game Help, crowdsources user gameplay

Each decision then opens up new paths leading to dozens of possible endings, similar to a “choose your own adventure” book. Its fragmentary and disordered story – as well as its playful spirit – is reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch. The experience of playing the game is marked by postmodern literary features – as described by critics like Mikhail Bakhtin or Linda Hutcheon – including metafiction, intertextuality and parody.

One of its creators – Davey Wreden, a critical studies graduate – also created The Beginner’s Guide (2015), a game in which the player moves through levels of failed video games to learn more about their mysterious creator. In one, the player’s task consists solely of wandering through a virtual cave reading the countless comments left there by other frustrated players.

In recent years, the genre of digital or electronic literature has emerged, including books with QR codes, works that can only be read with virtual reality headsets, poetry collections published as apps, and so on. These works are fundamentally based on language, begging the question of why video games cannot also fit into this category.

This debate takes on added relevance today, as digital formats are having an undeniable impact on our reading habits. Just as today we accept oral cultures or popular music as literature, perhaps one day we will do the same with interactive stories like The Stanley Parable. Writing has always tried to break away from established ideas, and we know that literature is not limited to words on paper. Sometimes it pays to disobey the voice in our heads and walk through the door on the right, the one that leads to new, unexplored possibilities.

• Andrés Porras Chaves is a Professor of Humanities, IE University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

By the time EA Play reached South Africa’s shores, it rocked up with a fee almost worthy of consideration: R50/m or R200/year. Aside from the aforementioned library of games, a subscription also offers a minimal 10% discount on upcoming titles and in-game titles, appealing most directly to folks who eagerly await the company’s next FIFA or Madden title every year.

EA Play(ing us for fools)

EA began warning subscribed customers of the change via email yesterday, noting that new prices will come into effect from 10 May 2024, according to GamesIndustry.biz, or “until your next renewal date that occurs on or after X” date. Thanks to u/ssa17k on Reddit, we’ve got an idea of what the email being sent to customers looks like.

And we haven’t even mentioned EA Play Pro, the company’s higher-tier subscription service, which is also included in the price hike. The difference here appears that Pro members can secure new titles instantly, rather than waiting for them to shrivel up and be passed onto the cheaper subscription package.

Read More: Dead Space (2023) PC review – We’re crossing the Event Horizon here

In South Africa, the monthly price of EA Play is being hiked up to R90/m (R40 increase), while a year will now set customers back R650/year (R400 increase). Step up to EA Play Pro, and you’ll pay R305/m (R105 increase), whereas a year of the service now costs R1,700/year (R500 increase).

EA’s email doesn’t mention the reason behind the massive price hike, though according to GamesIndustry.biz, the FIFA-maker is looking to “reflect changes in currency value and to bring fees in line with market value.” Translation? “We’d like more money, please and thank you.”

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Would your ancestors be proud?

Don’t fret, PlayStation won’t get hold of your abysmal Rocket League gameplay without your OK first. Community Game Help is an opt-in experience that will automatically record your gameplay when you complete a certain activity in titles that support Game Help. “Then, it will be reviewed by a moderator, and if approved, your video will be published as a Game Help hint for PlayStation players to watch, learn from, and rate.”

PlayStation says it’s purely a gameplay transaction, meaning your mic audio and camera visuals won’t be hitting Sony’s servers. Storage isn’t an issue either. Once a clip is finished uploading to Sony HQ, your PS5 will automatically delete it to free up space. If you’re one of the lucky ones to be chosen, a notification will pop up.

Read More: The PlayStation 5 “Slim” will finally land in South Africa this April

You’ll find these new video tips in the same place as the current iteration of Game Help. While in-game, hit the PS button, scroll over to the Control Centre and find the card titled “Hints Inside.” If the game supports gamer videos, a ‘Community Game Help‘ label will appear to assist with collecting trophies or beating the boss who’s been whooping your backside for the past two hours.

As for when you’ll have a chance to play, Sony hasn’t said. The most it gave away is that it will “become available in select games later this year, and our goal is to expand it to as many titles as possible in the future.”

It’s worth remembering that the PS5 Slim doesn’t offer any sort of technical upgrade to the original PS5’s hardware. It’s purely a cosmetic upgrade — meaning if you can stomach the superfluous bulk of the 2020 model — Koodoo’s sale should hit the spot perfectly. That’s even before getting the site’s still-running ‘0% interested 100% interested’ promotion involved. But we’ll get to that.

Striking PS5 deals

Already got a PS5 in your arsenal? That’s fine. While most of the sale is console-centric, you’ll find some half-decent deals on Sony’s PSVR 2, DualSense Edge or even the newly launched Portal handheld and accompanying line-up of Elite audio gear. They won’t all save a few thousand bucks, but if you’ve had these on your wishlist, now’s probably the time to cash in. Or rather, cash out.

We won’t highlight every deal on offer — we’d be here all day otherwise. Still, it’s worth checking out the entire sale for yourself.

Here’s what caught our eye:

• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Limited Edition PS5 (Disc) + voucher for Spider-Man 2 – R12,400 (save R3,600)
• PS5 (Disc) + DualSense Edge Controller bundle – R12,400 (save R2,100)
• PS5 (Digital) + voucher for Spider-Man 2 – R10,000 (save R1,900)
• PSVR 2 – R13,500 (save R2,000)
• PSVR 2 + Horizon Call of the Mountain – R13,800 (save R1,800)
• Nacon Daija Arcade Stick – R4,000 (save R1,000)

There’s no mention of how long the sale will be going on, but it’s clearly a ‘while stocks last’ situation.

Of course, Sony’s got that PS5 Pro on the way if the rumours are to be believed. Just this week we got a look at the console’s leaked specs, and they appear to be legit in both senses of the word. Sony’s reportedly targeting a holiday 2024 release, so saving up your cash might be the move if you can hold off from playing Hellidivers II until then.

As for Koodoo’s ‘0% interest 100% interested’ promotion, FNB customers who hold either an Aspire, Premier, Private Clients, Private Wealth or Signet credit card can “enjoy the convenience of spreading your payments over 12 or 24 months without the burden of interest.”

All they need to do is select the FNB/RNB budget plan on either the 12- or 24-month budget term at checkout and use one of the credit cards we mentioned to get in on the action. The FNB promotion ends on 13 May 2024 according to the Ts & Cs.

Just days after South Africa’s PlayStation distributor confirmed the launch of the PS5 Slim in April, we’re hearing news of Sony’s next big thing: the PS5 ‘Pro’. This isn’t coming from Sony directly, of course. It’s coming, as everything that counts as ‘news’ these days does, from an unofficial source (it was leaked) — by YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead. And later confirmed by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson.

Oh, and it’ll be arriving sometime in the holiday shuffle — to better target those Christmas wishlists — as long as it pumps out enough first-party titles, that is. Good thing Nintendo stood aside this year, huh?

Anyone familiar with the scene knows who Tom Henderson is, and that he doesn’t mess around. He verified that the documents seen in Moore’s Law is Dead’s video are the real thing, coming from a PlayStation developer portal — with the documents hitting relevant developers a few weeks back.

We won’t bore you with all the nitty-gritty details. This is a PS5 Pro, after all. It’s a PlayStation with hardware befitting the four-year gap between itself and the original console — one that’s reportedly being kitted out to best suit any customers picking up GTA VI when it drops next year thanks to its improved GPU that’ll apparently render up to three times faster.

A more consistent frame rate is expected at 4K resolutions, and there’s talk that its ray tracing capabilities could be three (or even four) times faster than the previous iteration. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR) has been rumoured to use Sony’s machine learning — similar to AMD’s FSR or Nvidia’s DLSS image upscaling features to possibly boost graphics up to 8K.

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Let’s settle this on LinkedIn…

Anyone against the idea of starving themselves to death probably has a LinkedIn account, perhaps against their will. Microsoft’s social platform has long been a place to go in search of jobs, or employees to fill those jobs — with everyone patting themselves on the back in the process. Now, the platform is looking to branch into gaming.

That might sound like we’re pulling your leg, but it’s true. The billion-strong userbase will soon be treated to at least three of the company’s in-house games; akin to the surge of simple internet games like Wordle or something from neal.fun. They’re called Queens, Inference, and Crossclimb. It isn’t Linkle or something equally Wordle-y, so the NYT should leave them be.

The obvious implementation would be to allow employees to compete against one another, or against other companies. And, according to app researcher Nima Owji, that’s exactly what’s happening.

LinkedIn later confirmed in a message to TechCrunch that it was indeed working on a selection of games, though failed to provide any sort of release window. “We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” the spokesperson said in a message to TechCrunch.

It’s… a strange move. A website aimed at professionals, would-be or otherwise, succumbing to the pull of time-killing games — designed to kill company time? We hope it all works out.

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Sony hits the pause button on VR

Virtual reality (VR) isn’t for everyone, apparently. You’d think Sony, a company where the bucks flow out of every orifice, would find a way to make it work. But if the rumours are true, the Japanese conglomerate has hit the pause button on PSVR 2 production and begun stockpiling the headsets thanks to declining sales quarter after quarter. Yikes.

We’re just spitballing here, but we reckon the R15,000 price tag — or the fact that it requires a PS5 to work — might have something to do with the declining sales. Don’t even get us started on the lacklustre support for games since its debut, riding on the Horizon Call of the Mountain high ever since. The closing of the PlayStation London division, reportedly working on VR titles, hasn’t helped.

The company’s saving grace could be its decision to allow PC support for the PSVR 2 headset. Or it might continue to sink deeper into this mess, as more people flock towards the similarly priced Meta Quest 3.

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Google’s Gemini on Apple iPhones

AI might be coming to Apple’s iPhones sooner, rather than later. That isn’t thanks to a massive push to get Apple’s in-house AI out sooner, but because of a possible deal that’ll put Google’s Gemini engine on Apple’s devices, according to Bloomberg’s sources familiar with the matter. If the reports are true, Apple’s also explored the possibility of plugging OpenAI’s engine into the development of its next phone.

Whatever the case, we won’t be hearing about it until June at the earliest at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. It seems that nothing has yet been agreed upon between Apple and Google — with no ideas of how a partnership would work, or how the AI would be introduced to the devices.

Whether this will affect Apple’s long-rumoured plans to develop its own artificial intelligence in-house has yet to be seen. Just last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook was going on about the massive potential of AI, and that the company was investing heavily in the area in general.

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As for the new console’s accessories — the standalone BluRay disc drive and Slim Vertical stand will be released alongside their console counterparts on 5 April 2024. The disc drive will cost R3,000, while the vertical stand (also sold separately) will cost R700.

ORIGINAL 15/03/2024:

Seriously, it’s time to say goodbye to that first-gen PS4 you’re still holding onto. We get it. A failing economy, nostalgia, and the fact that it doubles as a mini heater in Winter makes it an enticing bit of kit. But it’s 2024. It’s time to move on and what better way to do so than with the PS5 “Slim”, which is expected to land in South Africa sometime in early April.

It might not be a “Slim” in Sony’s eyes — who insists on calling it a plain old PlayStation 5 — but the massive weight and volume reduction coupled with a facelift that doesn’t make us want to hurl beg to differ. It’s a Slim, Sony. Get over it. And it’s turning up in South Africa, and soon. That’s what South Africa’s PlayStation distributor, Gamefinity had to say on the subject.

Will the real PS5 Slim please stand up?

When Sony first launched the refreshed PS5 in November last year, it didn’t come with any technical upgrades. It’s rocking the same hardware as a regular COVID-era PlayStation 5, wrapped in a smaller, lighter and prettier package. The most notable change was the loss of the disc drive, making the “Slim” an entirely digital affair.

Don’t worry, physical isn’t dead (yet). Sony’s dreamed up a solution that’ll see customers picking up their own disc drives and installing them separately, bringing in a new revenue stream for the Japanese company.

Read More: PS5 vs. PS5 Slim – What’s the difference?

If you were hoping for a price cut once the new consoles arrived, we envy your naivety. Sony’s sticking with the current console’s RRP of R12,000 for a PS5 with a single controller and no BluRay disc drive. If you’re after a bundle that contains a disc drive out of the box, you’ll be paying R14,000 — the price of the base PS5 in store now.

The PS5 Slim without a disc drive should arrive in the first week of April, as long as South Africa’s port services remain on track. The console’s Disc Drive Edition will only arrive three weeks later, nearer the end of April, again, contingent on South Africa’s port services.

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SIMA, which stands for Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent, is currently still in its research phase and is being trained to learn a broad range of gaming skills across a variety of scenarios — instead of just destroying humans at StarCraft II.

Through partnerships with video game developers Hello Games, Embracer, Tuxedo Labs, Coffee Stain, and others, SIMA is learning how games work and how to apply what it learns to games it’s never seen before. DeepMind’s eventual aim with SIMA, other than furthering natural language AI model research, is for it to be a devoted member of your party that does what it’s told and doesn’t take all the good loot.

Does this SIMA good idea?

“SIMA isn’t trained to win a game; it’s trained to run it and do what it’s told,” said Google DeepMind researcher and SIMA co-lead Tim Harley, according to The Verge.

SIMA researchers have focused on games that involve open-world play, rather than linear or story-driven titles, so the agent can learn to follow instructions. To achieve this, SIMA was trained by watching pairs of humans play a game — where one watched and gave instructions while the other carried them out. In a different scenario, players played freely while DeepMind researchers recorded instructions that would’ve resulted in what the player did.

We’ll admit this sounds rather appealing. If you’ve ever played an online co-op game that drops in randoms, you’ll know how risky that can be. There’s a good chance of them ruining your game, whether through incompetence or toxicity.

Having an AI party member who follows instructions means you won’t have to worry about watching your back or your hard-earned loot. Don’t feel like spending hours collecting resources? Tell SIMA to do it while you handle more important tasks.

Read More: DeepMind is back at it again, this time teaching AI how to play football

However, as appealing as this might sound, it’s worth remembering how training AI models on human behaviour — especially when online human interaction is involved — has gone in the past. TayTweets, anyone?

This probably isn’t a problem in a controlled research environment but, should SIMA ever be trained on average human-based online gameplay, we doubt it will take long before the griefing starts.

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Elon Musk still hasn’t given up on the idea of turning X into an ‘everything app‘, recently adding phone and video calls into what was once Twitter. Now the app is apparently expanding to… TVs. Yup. According to a Fortune report (via Bloomberg) over the weekend, the eccentric billionaire wants people tuning in to, uh, Tucker Carlson, we guess, on Samsung and Amazon TVs as early as next week.

Fortune doesn’t name its sources, only citing an unnamed employee within the company, but this is Musk we’re talking about. Of course he’s got a video app in the works — one that reportedly looks “identical” to YouTube’s own app — a ploy to try and draw customers and compete with YouTube simultaneously. Whether it’ll work is yet to be determined. Our guess? It’ll be abandoned within the year, tail tucked between its legs.

Or, we’ll be proven wrong, and have to bow down to a new overlord of internet TV. We’re not particularly excited about that prospect. That can only happen if X can lay hands on exclusive content and push the app out to a far-wider host of TV brands. The odd Putin interview or shoddy Diablo IV stream might garner at least a few eyeballs. We’ll find out if X’s unnamed would-be YouTube killer has enough gall to do so next week.

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MAR10 Day, unsurprisingly, delivered a bunch of Mario news

Yesterday was Mario day. MAR10 Day, et cetera et cetera. As usual, Nintendo served up a slew of Mario-related news on a platter, including a Super Mario Bros. sequel film that reminded us water is wet, and a few other announcements that took our cynicism down a notch. The first involves release dates for two classics remastered: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD.

Announced in September and June of 2023 respectively, it’s clear Nintendo’s been sitting on these titles for a while — possibly in an attempt to bolster the Switch’s 2024 line-up in the event of a delay to its follow-up console. That, unfortunately, happened. It’s fine. The 23 May release for Paper Mario and a 27 June release for Luigi’s Mansion should do enough to hold us over ’til 2025. Also, a Tears of the Kingdom replay might be on the cards.

The last announcement and possibly the most important involved a teaser for something going by called LEGO Mario Kart (a new game, maybe, or just new sets?) and three new Mario Lego sets hitting shelves this August. The Bowser Express train set is the most expensive of the lot, but honestly, King Boo’s Haunted Mansion set or the Battle with Roy at Peach’s Castle would suit us just fine.

Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t just in the business of deleting movies

You might have thanked Warner Bros. for vaulting Batgirl in 2022, but there’s no denying it set a horrific precedent that’s created a ripple effect across the rest of the business. Coyote vs. Acme is the latest (completed) film to be sent to the bins — and now the company is looking to do something similar for its games.

Several developers under the Adult Swim Games umbrella said that Warner Bros. Discovery reached out to them to essentially tell them that their games would be removed from digital storefronts on PC and consoles. Why? It might hint at the company’s plans for the Adult Swim Games brand — possibly looking to kill it off and watch the tax breaks roll in. Because that’s how business works, right?

Some of the affected developers said they would be republishing their games on Steam, but would lose out on the title’s community pages, Steam achievements, forums, and screenshots. That wouldn’t be the case if Warner would transfer publishing permissions to those developers — a process that takes roughly three minutes and three clicks according to @onemrbean — but isn’t being done due to a ‘lAcK oF rEsOuRcEs’.

You can see a list of the 25 games being removed by the $21 billion company right here.

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Your favourite Wordle clones might not be Wordle clones for much longer

Wordle, the word-guessing game that grabbed the world by its genitals in 2022, is looking to stomp out the thousands of clones riding off the back of the Wordle brand, idea, and colour scheme that The New York Times picked up for a cool “undisclosed price in the low-seven figures” in 2022.

The New York Times has reportedly filed several DMCA issues over any Wordle clones still out there, specifically targeting Reactle earlier this week, an open-source clone used to power around 1,900 other versions of the game. The NYT reckons the clones using Reactle’s code did so in “clearly bad faith,” and have been served the same DMCA takedown issue.

“I write to submit a revised DMCA Notice regarding an infringing repository (and hundreds of forked repositories) hosted by GitHub that instruct users how to infringe The New York Times Co.’s (‘The Times‘) copyright in its immensely popular Wordle game and create knock-off copies of the same,” the notice reads.

Expect plenty of those 1,900 or so games taken down to reappear in the coming weeks with Wordle-less names attached, and maybe a fresh coat of paint.

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The fun involved includes a decent store-wide sale on Switch consoles, games, and accessories — both online and in-store (check out what we thought of that) — and a competition that’ll see someone pick up a Switch bundle worth R10,000. So… a Switch and there might just be enough left over for a game or two. We’d recommend Super Mario Bros. Wonder or Odyssey, but we doubt Nintendo will let you do the picking.

There’s a fire! (sale)

The sale isn’t particularly special aside from a couple of standout items. The obvious leaders are the two Switch consoles on sale — the Switch OLED Mario Red Edition (for obvious reasons) or a plain ol’ Switch with a physical copy of Wonder for R8,000. That’s important. Seriously. Give it fifteen years, and it’ll pick up a couple of grand on eBay, easily.

The game that’s been slashed down the most is WarioWare: Get it Together! selling for R500 — R600 off the initial retail price. We’re not sure why you might want a Mario-branded SD card for the Switch, but we won’t stop you. Nintendo’s cut the price from R1,400 for a 256GB card to R700. Something similar fetches a lower price on Takealot, but we’re not telling you how to spend your money.

There are around five pages of sales explore, which you can do here.

O MAR10? Wherefore art thou, Mario?

As for the people who aren’t so interested in actually paying Nintendo, the company is running a competition that’ll win one lucky person a Switch hamper worth over R10,000. All you need to do is head to Nintendo’s official store in Sandton and… find Mario. Simple enough.

Find the fella (pictured above) sometime between 10:00 and 16:00 on Saturday or Sunday (9-10 March), snap a picture with him, and post it to social media using the tag #MAR10Day_SA and tag @NintendoSADistributor and @SandtonCityMall in the same post. Make your way back to the official store — use the Switch on display, play a round of Mario Kart (using Mario), and have a store representative mark off your lap and enter you into the competition.

Unfortunately, you’ll only reap the benefit of the 19 March release of the title if you’re an Apple customer. The game will be available on iPhone and iPad and only to Netflix subscribers. Even though it’ll be free, Netflix has opened pre-orders (more or less) for players keen to explore the tale of Zagreus.

Go to Hades

If you haven’t already hammered the pre-order link above so hard that you’ve left a dent in your iPhone screen, you should. Hades is a roguelike title that sees you playing as the son of the titular Greek god. Zagreus has many of the issues a young man faces and he’d really like to depart his father’s kingdom. Getting out of the Underworld will take some doing, however.

The resulting randomly-generated trips towards the Earth’s surface are a nigh-perfect blend of engaging gameplay loop, smoothly-developing and excellently-written narrative, and gradual unlocking of new weapons and abilities. It’s enough to keep you focused on the rapid combat for hours at a time. Even when players achieve their ultimate aim, there’s still more to see, experience, and unlock.

For Android fans, there’s unfortunately no timeline for a Hades release on mobile and there probably never will be. Supergiant Games has “no plans for additional versions of Hades at this time.” It’s that “at this time” remark we’re holding onto dearly in the hopes that plans might change down the road. We’ll have to make do with the game’s sequel that’s in the works, for now. Pity, that. It’s really an incredible game.