This week on The Sunday Sermon, I want to talk about a game where you die over and over and that’s the whole point.
Hades came out in 2020 from Supergiant Games and it is one of the best games of the last decade. If you haven’t played it, the basic setup is this: you are Zagreus, son of Hades, prince of the Underworld, and you want to escape. Your father has told you it isn’t possible. The realm itself seems to agree. Every run you fight your way through Tartarus, through Asphodel, through Elysium, and eventually to the gates of the surface world, and when you die ( which you will, repeatedly, especially at first) you wake up back at the beginning and do it all over again. The structure is called a roguelike, and in lesser hands it is just a game mechanic. In Hades, it is the story.
The thing that makes Hades different from every other game in this genre is that the dying isn’t a reset. Every time Zagreus gets back up, he is a little different than he was before. He has new information. He has built new relationships with the gods who are helping him from Olympus. He has had new conversations with the people in the House of Hades, including his cold and distant father who keeps sending him back and who Zagreus has to fight through every single time he makes it to the gates. The world does not reset. Only Zagreus does. And each time he resets, he is more than he was.
That is Romans 5:3-4, and I mean that almost literally.
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
Paul is describing a process. Not a single event. A sequence that plays out across repeated failure, repeated recovery, and repeated effort until something permanent is built in the person going through it. You don’t get character from one hard day. You get it from the same hard day happening again and again and choosing to get back up each time rather than accepting the floor as your permanent address.
Zagreus was born dead. That is not a metaphor — in the story of this game, the Fates decreed that Hades would have no heir, and so when Persephone, his mother, gave birth, the child arrived lifeless. Persephone fled the Underworld in grief, believing her son was gone. The goddess Nyx, who ruled the night, made a deal with the Fates and brought Zagreus back, raising him as her own child while keeping the truth about his mother from him entirely. Hades allowed the lie to continue to protect both Zagreus and Persephone. The result was a young man who grew up feeling like he didn’t belong anywhere, raised by a father who never showed him warmth and who he believed was cold to him for no reason, in a world that the game makes very clear was never fully his.
He starts the game not even knowing what he’s fully running toward. He discovers a letter in his father’s desk that reveals Persephone exists and that she is his real mother, and that revelation is what sets everything in motion. He decides he is going to find her. He decides he is going to escape the Underworld and get to the surface and meet the woman who never knew he lived. And he starts running, and he starts dying, and he starts getting back up.
What the game does brilliantly is that the failure never feels like punishment. It feels like tuition. Each run Zagreus pays a little more into the total cost of what he’s trying to do, and each run he gets something back for it — a new skill, a deeper conversation, a piece of the story he didn’t have before. The suffering produces perseverance in the most literal mechanical sense the game can offer. You cannot skip to the end. You cannot grind your way past the requirement. You have to go through it, repeatedly, until you have become the version of yourself that is capable of completing it.
I think about that in the context of my own faith a lot. The prosperity gospel version of Christianity would have you believe that following God means things go well for you, that difficulty is a sign of misalignment, that if you are suffering it is because something is wrong. Romans 5 says the opposite. Paul is writing from prison when he says this. He is not describing a theology of comfortable outcomes. He is describing a process where the suffering is the mechanism, not the obstacle. Where getting knocked down and getting back up is not a detour from the life God intends for you but the road itself.
Zagreus is knocked down more times than you can count. Every time he wakes up on the floor of the House of Hades, Hypnos the god of sleep is there to offer a mildly sympathetic comment about how he almost made it this time. The indignity of it is part of the design. You are supposed to feel the repetition. You are supposed to feel the weight of coming back to the same starting point again and again. Because the weight of it is what makes the eventual breakthrough mean something.
There is also something worth sitting with in the relationship between Zagreus and Hades that I don’t think gets talked about enough. Hades is not a simple villain in this story. He is a father who is cold and controlling and who lies to his son for years about his mother’s existence. He is also a father who watched his child be born dead, watched his wife flee in grief, and spent years protecting both of them from forces that would have destroyed them had the truth been known. He is not wrong that Zagreus can’t safely stay on the surface — that’s a real constraint, not a manufactured one. And at the end of the game, when Zagreus has fought through everything his father put in his way and reached Persephone and convinced her to come home, Hades does something that the whole game has been building toward without announcing it. He expresses genuine respect for his son. He asks Zagreus to keep running escape attempts, framed as security testing, which is the most emotionally closed-off possible way to say “I’m proud of you.” But it’s real.
That reconciliation didn’t happen because Zagreus gave up and accepted his father’s authority. It happened because Zagreus refused to. He ran, and fell, and ran again, and built himself into someone his father couldn’t ignore or dismiss, and the relationship changed because of what the suffering produced in him. Perseverance. Character. And at the end, something that looks a lot like hope — a mother who came back, a father who finally saw him, and a home that for the first time felt like it actually belonged to him.
Paul’s sequence in Romans 5 ends with hope, and he describes it as a hope that does not put us to shame because it is secured by something outside our own effort. For Paul that thing is God’s love poured out through the Holy Spirit. For Zagreus it is the bonds he built on the way down and on the way back up — with Nyx, with the Olympians, with the people of the House who cheered him on run after run after run. You cannot make it out of the Underworld alone. But you can make it if you keep getting up.
That’s the sermon. Don’t stay down.
See you next Sunday.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at our Vortex Effect forums.
