Games Like Hades II: 12 Picks for 2026
Hades II is the most polished narrative roguelite available in 2026. Melinoe, Hecate's witchcraft, the Crossroads hub, the branching up-or-down structure. Supergiant took the Hades 1 template and pushed every element further. The full 1.0 launched on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and Windows on 25 September 2025, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S following on 14 April 2026. If you've finished the current content and want more, this list from the team at Tyrian Games covers the twelve games closest in shape, ordered by how much of Hades II's specific DNA they share.
TL;DR
- Hades II's distinguishing features are witchcraft casting, branching geography, dual-direction progression, and the Crossroads hub.
- Closest matches are the original Hades, Cult of the Lamb, Moonlighter 2, Slay the Spire, and HAWKER in September 2026.
- The best current adjacent games are story-rich roguelites and Supergiant's own back catalogue.
- HAWKER adds shopkeeping and a thirty-day deadline to the narrative-roguelite pattern.
- Hades II took the 2025 best-reviewed-game slot on both Metacritic and OpenCritic at the time of its console release.
The twelve
1. Hades (Supergiant Games, 2020). The original. If you haven't played it, play it. Hades II builds directly on Hades 1's structure. The 2020 game is shorter, tighter, and arguably more thematically focused. You can finish it in 20 to 50 hours depending on how thoroughly you chase the true ending.
2. Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022). Cozy-grim roguelite with cult management. Hub work between runs is deeper than Hades II's. Combat is less satisfying. If you liked the hub-management half of Hades II, Cult of the Lamb goes further on that specifically. Millions sold, continuing post-launch content.
3. HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026). Our game. Narrative roguelite plus shopkeeping plus a thirty-day deadline. The narrative layer is Ink-driven, on Inkle Studios' engine, the same one used in 80 Days and Heaven's Vault. If you liked Hades II's story-per-run compounding and want a version with operational shop management and a ticking clock, HAWKER is your next. Wishlist on Steam.
4. Moonlighter 2 (Digital Sun, Early Access November 2025). PC Gamer described Moonlighter 2 as "cozy with a heavy helping of Hades," which is a precise tag. Combat shares rhythm with Hades II. The shop layer is Moonlighter 2's addition, and the first major Early Access update in March 2026 widened the combat path further.
5. Slay the Spire (Mega Crit, 2019). Card-based narrative roguelite. Less text-heavy than Hades II but strong character work through gameplay and boss dialogue. The best card roguelite ever made, and a sequel is in active development at the time of writing.
6. Monster Train (Shiny Shoe, 2020). Card roguelite with more elaborate between-run narrative than Slay the Spire. Tower-defence-shaped combat. Fills the same post-Hades itch Slay the Spire does, with a slightly more narratively dense shell.
7. Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games, 2021). Card-based narrative roguelite with meta-game narrative structure. Unique in the genre. If you liked Hades II's compounding story approach, Inscryption delivers it in a completely different shape, and its reveal moment in the second act is one of the best structural surprises of the last five years.
8. Darkest Dungeon 2 (Red Hook Studios, 2023). Grimmer than Hades II, slower, more stressful. Caravan-based run structure across a dying continent. For players who liked Hades but wished it hit harder emotionally, Darkest Dungeon 2 is the darker sibling.
9. Dead Cells (Motion Twin, 2018, still updated). Pure roguelite, less narrative, more combat polish. If you liked Hades II's combat specifically and don't need the narrative layer, Dead Cells is the tighter combat experience. Continued DLC support has kept it fresh through 2026.
10. Curse of the Dead Gods (Passtech Games, 2021). Roguelite dungeon-crawl with a light-and-shadow mechanic and Aztec-flavoured mythology. Narrative is lighter than Hades II but the combat is strong, and the light mechanic is closer in spirit to Hawker's than anything else on this list.
11. Risk of Rain 2 (Hopoo Games, 2020). Third-person action roguelite with environmental storytelling. No dialogue-driven narrative like Hades II, but strong lore through monster logs and one of the best scaling-difficulty systems in the genre.
12. Rogue Legacy 2 (Cellar Door Games, 2022). Family-descendant roguelite. Lighter on narrative, heavier on mechanical unlock trees. The structural ancestor of Hades' hub-based run framing, and worth playing to see where the narrative-roguelite shape first came from.
What's special about Hades II
Four things Hades II does that few other narrative roguelites match.
Dialogue density. Hades II has thousands of lines of triggered dialogue. Characters react to specific combat events, specific boon combinations, specific previous conversations. This level of scripting is expensive to produce and rare to see done well.
Dual-direction progression. Melinoe can go up to the surface or down deeper into the underworld, and the two arcs progress somewhat independently. Most roguelites have a single direction of escalation. Hades II's fork is a structural innovation that tests whether the narrative-roguelite formula can support more than one axis of progression at a time.
The Crossroads hub. Expands the House of Hades' pattern with a larger, more populated between-run space. The hub's own development becomes part of the narrative arc in a way the House only partially achieved.
Hecate's witchcraft system. Casts function as an alternative to the standard weapon-and-boon loop. They're slower, deliberate, area-based, and they reward a different combat mindset than Zagreus' dash-strike rhythm. Players who preferred Hades 1's combat sometimes find Hades II's witchcraft a different enough game that it takes a few runs to acclimate.
If you want games that approach any of these specifically, the closest shots are Supergiant's own back catalogue (Pyre, Transistor) for dialogue density, Cult of the Lamb for dual-management structure, and the handful of deck-builders that treat cast-timing as the primary decision axis.
A first-hand Hawker example
One of Hades II's achievements is that the between-run hub feels populated without feeling crowded. That calibration was one of the things we spent the most time on in Hawker. Our caravan is smaller than the Crossroads by design, because it has to move every few days, so we can't build a permanent city-like hub. Instead we tried to make the caravan feel populated by giving each NPC a relational memory that ticks across days.
In late 2025 we had a playtest where a tester came back to the caravan on Day 20 after a particularly rough Day 19 run. She'd lost most of her cart, nearly died, and arrived home after dark. The first NPC she met, the caravan's fire-keeper, didn't say anything about the combat. She asked if the Hawker had eaten that day. The tester paused. Then she laughed, the kind of tired laugh you do when a game does something you don't expect. That line was triggered by a specific combination of state: low energy, late hour, no food consumed on Day 19. It's not a dense scene. It's a single line that arrives in the right moment. That's the Hades II lesson we've been chasing, and we credit Supergiant with teaching the genre what specificity is worth. The line took us three tries to get right. The result is that the caravan feels like it watches.
FAQ
Is Hades II better than Hades?
Contested. Most players say Hades II is more mechanically developed. Many say Hades 1 is more thematically focused. Both are excellent. Hades II holds the 2025 best-reviewed-game slot on Metacritic and OpenCritic at the time of its console launch, which suggests the critical consensus leans toward the sequel.
What's the best game to play after Hades II?
Depends on what you liked. Cult of the Lamb for hub management. Moonlighter 2 or HAWKER for combat-plus-economy. Slay the Spire for card-roguelite structure. Darkest Dungeon 2 if you wanted more darkness and more emotional stakes.
Is HAWKER like Hades II?
Yes, structurally. Narrative roguelite with compounding character arcs. Different specifically in having a shop management layer and a thirty-day deadline rather than open-ended run accumulation.
Is Hades II finished?
The full 1.0 release shipped on 25 September 2025. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions launched on 14 April 2026. Supergiant typically continues to add content post-launch, so check their blog for current status.
Are there any shopkeeper roguelites like Hades II?
Moonlighter 2 and HAWKER in September 2026 are the closest. See our games like Hades with shops piece for the longer treatment of that specific subgenre.
How Hades II's console launch changed the conversation
The April 2026 PS5 and Xbox launch pulled a significant new cohort of players into the genre who'd never touched Hades or Hades II on Switch or PC. This matters for the list above because those players come with different reference games. A console player whose Hades II was their first narrative roguelite has different follow-up needs than a PC player who played the original Hades in 2020.
For the console-first cohort, we recommend Cult of the Lamb and Dead Cells as the best next stops because both have strong console versions and both scale the Hades formula in accessible directions. For the PC cohort, the list above in full order works fine.
The post-Hades II content wave
Supergiant's confirmed post-launch content for Hades II extends the game's life through 2026 and likely into 2027. This means the "what to play after Hades II" question has a moving target. The game itself keeps producing more content, so the urgency to find the next game is lower than it would be for a finished release. Many of the games above will still be on your list a year from now, because Hades II is the kind of game you return to rather than finish once.
Extended genre notes
Worth naming a few observations about the broader indie gaming landscape this category sits in across 2026. The indie market has grown significantly since 2020, with Steam alone now publishing thousands of titles per year. Discovery is the category's biggest challenge, not production. Most players find new games through a combination of algorithmic recommendation, word of mouth, and curated lists like this one.
The 2026 commercial story for the category favours studios that ship with clear positioning rather than studios that ship as genre-default entries. A game that knows who it's for tends to find its audience even at small scale. A game that hopes to be liked by everyone often ends up being recommended by no-one. HAWKER's positioning (grimdark shopkeeper roguelite, Breton folklore, thirty-day clock) is deliberately narrow because narrow positioning travels better than broad positioning in 2026's crowded indie market.
The audience for this category tends to cross generational lines. Players who grew up on 1990s PC games, players who came in through the 2010s indie boom, and players new to indies through 2020s word-of-mouth are all represented. The category isn't age-coded the way some indie genres are, which means studios can build for breadth rather than specific cohorts.
Practical buying advice
If you're using this list to build a reading-and-playing library, a few practical suggestions. Most of the games mentioned go on Steam sale at least twice a year, often at 50 percent or more off. Adding them to your wishlist and waiting for the next sale is usually the most cost-efficient approach. Many of the older entries are cheap year-round. The newer ones often go on sale first during Steam's summer or winter sales. HAWKER's Early Access price is below the planned full-release price, which is standard indie practice.
If you play on handheld (Steam Deck, Switch 2, ROG Ally) most of the games above run well on these platforms. The category tends to be performance-friendly because the production values prioritise tone over graphical fidelity. This is worth knowing because category fans often play across multiple platforms.
Spoiler wall
Everything above keeps Hawker at the level of systems and shape. The caravan, the day-night cycle, and Ankou's debt are all openly shown in our trailers and store page. Specific late-game NPC arcs and the endings that depend on relationship state across days 20 to 30 sit behind this wall.
Closing
Hades II sits at the peak of narrative roguelite design. The twelve games above either share its DNA or offer specific pieces of it in different packaging. If you've finished the current Hades II content and want the same compounding-narrative feel in different shape, the canon is small but strong.
Next read: Narrative roguelites after Hades, or Games like Hades with shops.