Hades is the game everyone names when they want to explain what a roguelite can be. It's also the game most people mean when they ask for "something like Hades," which is a harder request than it sounds, because Hades is doing four or five things at once and no single game does all of them. This list, from the team at Tyrian Games, is fifteen games that each capture a real piece of what Hades got right — sorted, near the end, by which part you actually fell for.
We build a roguelite ourselves, and Hades is the game we point at most when we explain HAWKER to people. So this isn't a list assembled from a wiki. It's the list we'd give a friend who just rolled credits on Hades and felt that specific post-Hades emptiness, the one where nothing else quite scratches.
If you've specifically finished the sequel, we have a companion piece — games like Hades II — that focuses on the 2025 release. This one is about Hades the original and the broader question of what to play next.
TL;DR
- The single best answer is Hades II, and it's not close. Everything else on this list captures one piece of Hades; the sequel captures most of them.
- For Hades' combat feel: Dead Cells, Returnal, Curse of the Dead Gods.
- For Hades' story-through-repetition: Hades II, Inscryption, Darkest Dungeon 2.
- For Hades' "death is part of the world": Have a Nice Death, HAWKER in September 2026.
- The hardest part of Hades to replicate is the voice acting and reactive dialogue, which is why Supergiant's own back catalogue (Pyre, Transistor) is on the list.
The fifteen
1. Hades II (Supergiant Games, full release 2025). The obvious answer and the correct one. Melinoe instead of Zagreus, witchcraft instead of pure weapons, a map that branches up and down. It is more of Hades, made by the people who made Hades, with everything they learned. If you loved the first game, this is not a substitute — it's the continuation.
2. Dead Cells (Motion Twin, 2018, still updated). If what you loved about Hades was the hands — the dash, the dodge, the snap of a well-timed attack — Dead Cells is the purest hit of that feeling. Less story, more flow. Eight years of updates have made it enormous. The closest thing to Hades' combat rhythm without Hades' narrative weight.
3. Curse of the Dead Gods (Passtech Games, 2021). Hades' structural cousin: room-by-room dungeon dives, a light-and-darkness mechanic, a build that compounds across a run. Aztec mythology instead of Greek, greedier and grimmer in tone. Underplayed, and the closest thing on this list to HAWKER's own light-and-shadow combat, which is why we keep recommending it.
4. Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022). Takes Hades' loop and bolts a cult-management sim onto the hub. The combat is lighter, but the between-run base-building goes further than the House of Hades ever did. If the part of Hades you liked was coming home between runs, this is your game. Our games like Cult of the Lamb piece has the longer version.
5. Returnal (Housemarque, 2021; PC 2023). Hades' budget sibling. AAA bullet-hell roguelite with a genuinely disturbing story about a woman trapped in a loop she can't explain. Harder than Hades, less generous, more atmospheric. The one big-studio roguelite that earns its place next to the indie greats.
6. Have a Nice Death (Magic Design Studios, 2023). You play Death, running a company, fighting your own overworked employees. A fast, stylish action roguelite that shares Hades' trick of making mortality charming rather than morbid. Hand-drawn, sharp, and thematically adjacent in a way few games are.
7. Rogue Legacy 2 (Cellar Door Games, 2022). The descendant structure Hades refined started here: you die, your heir inherits the gold and a random trait, and the family tree grows. More forgiving than Hades about death, with generous metaprogression trees. A great entry point if Hades was your first roguelite and you want a gentler second.
8. Risk of Rain 2 (Hopoo Games, 2020). If you loved how a Hades build snowballs into absurdity, Risk of Rain 2 is the snowball taken to its logical end — a third-person action roguelite where stacked items turn you into a god right before the difficulty catches up. Stellar in co-op, which Hades never offered.
9. Children of Morta (Dead Mage, 2019). A narrative action roguelite about a single family defending their mountain. Pixel-art, warm, and structured around relationships the way Hades is. Less mechanically deep, more emotionally direct. For the players who stayed in Hades as much for the family as the fighting.
10. Hades-by-way-of-cards: Slay the Spire (Mega Crit, 2019). If the part of Hades you obsessed over was the boon synergies — the moment two unrelated upgrades suddenly combine — Slay the Spire is that feeling as an entire game. Cards instead of combat, but the same dopamine. The deckbuilder everyone else is still chasing.
11. Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games, 2021). Shares Hades' instinct that a roguelite can tell a real story through its structure, then takes it somewhere Hades never would. Saying more spoils it. If you liked that Hades' narrative used the death loop instead of apologising for it, this is essential.
12. Pyre (Supergiant Games, 2017). Supergiant's strangest game: a roguelite-adjacent ritual-sports RPG with branching narrative and the studio's signature writing and art. Not a Hades clone — it predates Hades — but it's where Supergiant learned to make a party feel like people. For the voice, not the combat.
13. Transistor (Supergiant Games, 2014). Earlier Supergiant, included for the same reason: the writing, the art, the music, the feeling that a small team is showing off in the best way. Action-RPG rather than roguelite, but if you loved Hades' texture, this is more of it.
14. Darkest Dungeon 2 (Red Hook Studios, 2023). Hades' grim, slow, stressful relative. A caravan crossing a dying world, narrative delivered between runs, death that hits emotionally. For the player who finished Hades and thought, "good, but I want it to hurt more." Our games like Darkest Dungeon list covers the wider family.
15. HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026). Ours. A debt-driven shopkeeper roguelite that takes Hades' "every run advances the story" idea and ties it to a thirty-day clock and a debt to Death. The narrative runs on Ink, Inkle Studios' engine — the one behind 80 Days and Heaven's Vault — so NPCs remember what you did across days. If you loved that Hades' world reacted to your runs, HAWKER is built around that reaction. Wishlist on Steam.
What made Hades work, and why it's so hard to copy
People credit Hades' success to its combat, and the combat is excellent, but the combat isn't the rare part. Plenty of games dodge and dash well. The rare part is that Hades made dying feel like progress in three separate registers at once — mechanically, you got stronger; narratively, you learned more of the story; and emotionally, the characters greeted your failure like it mattered. Most games manage one of those. Hades did all three on every single death.
That triple payload is why "games like Hades" is such a slippery request. A game can nail the combat and feel hollow on death (much of the action-roguelite field). A game can nail the narrative and feel stiff in the hands (some of the deckbuilders). The reason Hades II is the only complete answer on this list is that it's the only game that inherited all three registers, because it was made by the only team that knew how.
The piece almost nobody replicates is the dialogue. Hades has thousands of lines of fully voiced, context-aware writing — characters who reference your last run, your current weapon, the specific god whose boon you just refused. That's enormously expensive, and it's the single biggest gap between Hades and its imitators. When you feel a game is "almost Hades but missing something," the missing something is usually this.
Sort by the part of Hades you loved
Here's the useful version of this list. Don't pick by genre — pick by which part of Hades kept you up.
You loved the combat. Dead Cells, Returnal, Curse of the Dead Gods. Start with Dead Cells.
You loved the story. Hades II first, then Inscryption, then Darkest Dungeon 2 for a darker take. If you want the writing more than the roguelite, Pyre and Transistor.
You loved the builds. Slay the Spire and Risk of Rain 2. The synergy-chasing itch lives in both.
You loved coming home between runs. Cult of the Lamb, with the deepest hub on the list. HAWKER, where the hub is a caravan that has to keep moving.
You loved that death meant something. Have a Nice Death and HAWKER, the two games here built around mortality as a theme rather than a fail state.
A first-hand Hawker example
Hades gave us our hardest question: what's our dash?
Every great action roguelite has a signature verb, the thing your hands reach for without thinking. Hades has the dash. Dead Cells has the roll. We spent most of 2024 without one, and you could feel the absence in playtests — the combat was competent and completely anonymous. Testers described it accurately and unmemorably. Nobody said "I love the thing where you—" because there was no thing.
The breakthrough came from leaning into our setting instead of borrowing Hades' grammar. HAWKER's world has a day-night cycle, and we'd always planned for night to be more dangerous. The idea we'd been circling was: what if night made you more dangerous too? We built a light-and-shadow mechanic where stepping into darkness charges your abilities — you hit harder, move faster, see less — and stepping back into light spends it and steadies you. Suddenly there was a verb. Testers started pushing into the dark on purpose, riding the edge of how much risk they could carry, then ducking back to the light to cash out. One tester called it "the greed button," which is the best thing anyone's said about our combat.
We owe that whole direction to studying Hades and Curse of the Dead Gods and asking, honestly, what is the one thing the player's hands will remember? Hades answered that question better than almost any game ever has. We didn't copy the dash. We copied the discipline of insisting there be an answer at all. It took us most of a year and one tester's offhand phrase to find ours.
Why nothing has truly dethroned Hades
It's been years, the genre is enormous, and the consensus best-in-class is still a Supergiant game. That's worth sitting with. The reason isn't that nobody's tried — the reason is that Hades' advantage compounds in a way budgets can't easily buy. The voice cast, the reactive script, the art direction, and the years of post-launch polish form a moat made of craft-hours, not features. You can copy the dash in a month. You can't copy a thousand reactive lines and a perfect voice cast in a month.
What this means for the rest of us building in the genre is liberating, actually. There's no point trying to out-Hades Hades. The games on this list that thrive are the ones that took one of Hades' ideas somewhere Hades didn't go — Cult of the Lamb into management, Inscryption into metafiction, Returnal into horror. That's the lane. Not "Hades but more," but "the Hades idea, pointed at a different world." It's the lane we're trying to drive HAWKER down, and it's the only lane in this genre that leads somewhere new.
FAQ
What game is most like Hades?
Hades II, made by the same studio. It shares all of Hades' DNA and pushes it further. Nothing else captures more than one or two of Hades' qualities at once.
Is there a game like Hades but with co-op?
Risk of Rain 2 is the best co-op roguelite that scratches the Hades itch. Children of Morta also offers local co-op with a narrative focus.
What should I play after Hades if I want the story, not just the combat?
Hades II first, then Inscryption for structural surprise, or Supergiant's own Pyre and Transistor for the writing and voice.
Is HAWKER like Hades?
Structurally, yes — every run advances the narrative and the world reacts to you. HAWKER differs by adding shopkeeping, a thirty-day deadline, and a light-and-shadow combat system rather than a dash-based one.
Is Hades on Steam Deck?
Yes, and it's one of the best-running games on the device. Most games on this list are Steam Deck verified or playable.
One honest caveat
If you've played Hades to true completion and you're chasing the exact high of those first twenty hours, accept now that you probably won't find it again, the same way you can't reread a great book for the first time twice. The games above are excellent and several are better than Hades at one specific thing. None of them will be your first Hades. That's not a knock on them. It's just how first times work. Play them for what they are, not for what they remind you of, and you'll have a far better time.
Spoiler wall
Everything above keeps HAWKER at the level of shape and system. The caravan, the day-night inversion, the debt to Death, and the thirty-day clock are all shown openly on our store page and trailers. Specific late-run NPC arcs sit behind this wall.
Closing
"Games like Hades" is really five different requests wearing one coat. Figure out which part of Hades you loved, and the right next game is on this list. And if the part you loved was that every death moved the story forward, keep an eye on us in September.
Next read: Games like Hades II, or Best roguelites on Steam 2026.