Can You Kill the Dog?

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #176. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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What does digital grass feel like?

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[This article contains spoilers for Hades II’s early access]

Hades’ Cerberus began life as a sweet, pettable little guy who had never done anything wrong in his life.

When the original game was in early access, there was no reason for the hound of hell to be a real enemy. Zagreus couldn’t make it to the surface, because it hadn’t been developed yet, so there was no need for Cerberus to intervene. Instead, he lay around in the house of Hades, each of his three heads looking sweet.

Eventually, of course, Zagreus did have to cross that threshold. But Supergiant had already set themselves up; surely the prince of the underworld couldn’t kill his beloved pet? But they came up with a nifty solution: the temple of Styx being a quest to find a “fetid sack” to distract the dog so that Zag could sneak past. (I’m still not sure what the sack is meant to be, but maybe that’s for the best.)

But dodging the Cerberus fight wasn’t just a quirk of development. It was also part of a trend in Supergiant’s underworld towards a softer mythology. In its adaptive move, Hades strikes a lot of the darker elements from the Greek stories it borrows from, and recasts other parts. This is common in all kinds of adaptation, but it’s of note when it comes to Greek myth retellings, particularly those that have boomed since the runaway success of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.

“The Achilles of the Iliad is a hard character to sympathise with, and he doesn’t serve the purpose of the story Miller is trying to tell,” says classicist Kate Alexandra in her video The Problem With Greek Mythology Retellings. So, it goes too for the Achilles of Hades, whose calm, kind mentorship is much more Song than Iliad. And it’s not just Cerberus and Achilles – in fact, it would be easier to list the characters who aren’t nicer versions of themselves in Hades. It might be all of them.

So of course you can’t kill your family pet. Except, in Hades II, you can.

Melinoë, fighting down rather than up, encounters a raging Cerberus on the outskirts of the underworld. He’s no longer a friendly puppy. Black and scaly, he rises from the ground as if rooted in hell and tries to crush and chomp Melinoë. And in return, although she repeatedly refers to it as “calming him down” she absolutely destroys him.

Although he always returns, due to the twin revivifying effects of the roguelike and, presumably, his undead status in service to Hades, it’s undeniable that Melinoë deals great violence to what would have been her childhood pet had she not lost her family to Chronos. If you get far enough in a run, you can bump into him again later, looking as he did in the original game and no longer violent, but he still refuses petting. He doesn’t know Melinoë, and the rupture caused by Chronos has changed him.

My guess is that they’ll add the ability to pet him later in early access, but my hope is that they will not. As well as adding a very tangible reminder of the family life that Melinoë lost, it also presents Hades II as a different adaptation of similar source material. All adaptations are works of alchemy, changing one story to fit a new purpose, and a new space and culture. But Hades and Hades II released only a few years apart, so their differences suggest a shift in what the sequel has to say.

If Cerberus’s anger is anything to go by, this may be a more nuanced look at the mythology both games pull from – something the original was missing.

There’s a tension left unaddressed in Hades and simmering under the surface of Hades II: the guy in question sucks. In mythology, Hades is best known for abducting Persephone; this is changed to a proactive choice made by Persephone in Hades as it is in almost all modern retellings. This is a choice with its own merits and downsides (which Alexandra gets into in her video above), but in Hades it mostly leaves open questions. Why exactly Persephone left Olympus is never explained, and neither is why she returned to the surface. She’s somehow both the driving force of the game and a completely unaddressed plot point.

Hades, too. He’s an abusive father and tyrannical ruler who gets to put all of that aside unquestioned when Persephone returns. In Hades II it’s revealed they had another child together, a pretty portrait of the whole family is the only thing left behind when they’re all imprisoned by Chronos.

The tension, however, isn’t gone. Melinoë was raised on tales of her family, particularly her father, and she feels strongly about his rightful place on the throne. When she kills certain enemies, she calls them traitor. Traitor to the king who keeps them locked in Tartarus?

And you can run into Hades himself – at the same time you see Cerberus again, in fact. Like his pet, he, too, is mollified. Shackled, he speaks softly to Melinoë. He talks of his regret that he didn’t get to see her grow up. He tries to warn her away so that she doesn’t get hurt, even if it means his eternal incarceration.

He’ll give you a boon that specifically targets Chronos, and sometimes when it goes off his voice will appear over the chaos: “wretched father.” The first time this happened I said “Really?!” out loud.

Coming from him, it’s so hypocritical that it immediately throws the cyclic nature of violence in these games into sharp relief. The missing plot points in Hades feel like Supergiant writing themselves into a corner with their softening adaptation of myths that don’t otherwise fit the less intense nature they were going for. In Hades II, the tensions seem more pointed.

Of course, Melinoë, raised on the propaganda of her lost family, thinks restoring Hades to the throne is the way forward. But are we really supposed to believe that? She was also brought up on stories of Cerberus, sweet three-headed good boy. And he turned out to be a monster.

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Jay Castello is a freelance writer covering games and internet culture. If they’re not down a research rabbit hole you’ll probably find them taking bad photographs in the woods.