Orpheus perked up: He’d given up any hope of ever finding Eurydice. The next time I returned to the House of Hades, killed by some hellish foe or another, Zagreus told Orpheus he’d met Eurydice. She was the muse he’d been pining after, the reason he no longer sang. She was, understandably, incredibly angry: “The two of us are finished,” she told Zagreus. ![]() Eurydice was stuck there in Asphodel, she told me, because her good-for-nothing husband had tried and failed to get her out of the underworld when she died, and now she was making peace with her lot in the afterlife. It sounded like a breakup song, which in a way it was. “No burdens / no further debts to be paid.” When I first happened upon her chamber in Asphodel, an area that had been flooded with bubbling lava, I stopped to listen as Eurydice, voiced by Ashley Barrett, sang what I later learned was called “Good Riddance.” “Farewell / to all the earthly remains,” she sang. You learn something on each run, and the rhythm of the game quickly became familiar to me as I progressed through room after room of enemies intent on stopping my escape.Įurydice broke that rhythm by quite literally interrupting the music I’d come to expect. The story, which recently earned a Hugo Award, the first for any video game, unfolds over the course of your escape attempts: Perhaps you meet a new character on one attempt who greets you with familiarity on your next pass, or you unlock a skill that makes escaping easier. I reacted to the news of four generations of family members contracting the virus by picking up my Nintendo Switch, finding comfort in the fictional dead as I worried for the living. ![]() As my colleague Alanna Okun wrote last September, looping video games have felt especially soothing amid a pandemic in which the days seem to run into each other my jaunts through the underworld provided an escape from the headlines as the delta variant plowed through India, the country where I grew up, last spring. The looping mechanic and recurring motifs of death and resurrection in the game, released in September 2020, felt oddly cathartic. Hades, the fourth game from the indie developer Supergiant, adds a coda. The story had always struck me as a tragedy, two lovers forever separated by the wily god of the dead. Either way, Orpheus fails, and Eurydice is swept back to the land of the dead. In the original story, Orpheus looks back just as he reaches the doors of the underworld because he can no longer hear Eurydice’s footsteps in the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s retelling of the myth, he looks back because Eurydice calls out to him. Impressed by Orpheus’s skill, Hades, the god of the underworld, allows him to take Eurydice’s soul back to the surface where she may live - so long as Orpheus never looks back to make sure she is following him. The talented musician Orpheus, stricken with grief at the death of his wife and muse, plays his lyre so skillfully that Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of the underworld, lets him pass. I’m one of those people who went through a Greek mythology phase when they were kids, so the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is familiar to me. It’s the beginning of a side quest - one that makes me recognize just how special Hades is. The woman’s name, the game tells me, is Eurydice. ![]() So to hear the sound of a woman singing in the middle of the flaming depths of the underworld made me stop in my tracks. The underworld does not give up one of its own easily, and you will find yourself dying often, only to return to the House of Hades and attempt to escape again.Įarly in the game I had met Orpheus, the court musician in the House of Hades, who told me he stopped singing because he had lost his muse I figured this was the game, with a sly nod to the classics, telling me not to expect any stirring vocals anytime soon. This is, to put it lightly, easier said than done. You play as Zagreus, the son of the titular ancient Greek god of the dead, and your goal is to fight through the levels of the underworld - Tartarus, Asphodel, and Elysium - to reach the surface of the Earth, where you hope to find your mother, Persephone. Music is not rare in Hades - the video game’s soundtrack is an absolute banger that follows players throughout the entire journey, punctuated only by moments of silence at the end of battles - but actual singing, up until that point, had been nonexistent. Halfway through hell, I hear the singing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |