By Godly Design: God and Goddess Representation and Appeal in Hades II

This paper explores how the gods/desses are represented in Supergiant Games’ Hades II (2024). This paper examines how the gods are designed to suit a modern audience in making the gods reflective of their personified element by incorporating ancient iconography in new, modern interpretations (e.g. Apollo is adorned with a golden, sun-rayed breastplate, Hestia has a hearth for a headdress, and Hephaestus has a prosthetic leg and sits in a wheelchair) and therefore, more easily associable to a layman audience. This paper takes the methodology approach of characterization of mythological characters in video games established by Vandewalle (2026), following Aarseth’s (1997) foundations of video games as an "ergodic" medium, where a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader [i.e. player] to traverse the text.” Whereby, as Vandewalle et al. (2024) and others have argued, video games can and should be seen, understood, and examined as a form of text. The gods/desses will be examined through their character, storyworld, and medium cues as a rationale for the overall appeal and popular success of Hades II and Hades I (2020).