A Practical Guide To Getting Through Of Olympus The House Of Hades
I spent roughly eighty hours in Of Olympus The House Of Hades before I actually felt like I understood what the game was trying to do. It's an indie roguelike that borrows heavily from the Hades formula but recontextualizes it inside Greek mythology with a distinctly darker tone. The basic loop is straightforward: you descend through levels of the Underworld, fighting enemies, collecting upgrades, and dying. Dying is not a failure state. It's how you unlock the next area. The game boots you into a hub area called the Underworld Athenaeum, which functions as your base of operations. Here you meet characters, accept quests, and access the upgrade terminal. The first thing I learned the hard way was that you should not skip the tutorial fights. They look simple, but they teach you the parry timing, which is the single most important mechanic in the entire game. Miss your parry window by half a second and you will take damage you don't need to be taking. The parry window is tighter than most action roguelikes I've played. It's roughly 0.4 seconds of active invincibility frames once you nail the button press. Your starting character has three weapons available to switch between during a run: a standard blade, a pair of daggers, and a heavy hammer. The daggers are fast but low damage. The hammer is slow but has decent range and stagger potential. The blade is the middle ground. I recommend starting with the blade until you get a feel for the enemy patterns. Every enemy in the first three zones telegraphs their attacks with a red glow on their weapon or a brief windup animation. Learn those animations and you will survive longer than you think you will.
When you die, you return to the Athenaeum with any permanent upgrades you purchased with Obols, the currency you collect from defeated enemies and treasure chests. The upgrade terminal is located to the right of the main courtyard. It costs anywhere from five to fifty Obols per upgrade. I usually spend my first few runs just buying health upgrades and one weapon skill. Don't spread yourself too thin early on. A maxed out health pool with no defensive skills will get you killed faster than a balanced loadout with mediocre stats. One thing the game does well is track your progress visually. Each area you clear unlocks a map node on the world screen. New quests appear here. New characters show up. The narrative unfolds through conversations in the hub, not through cutscenes during runs. This means if you're looking for story content, you have to actually talk to people instead of skipping dialogue. My biggest frustration during my first dozen runs was managing the Curse system. Every run you can choose to activate a Curse at the start, which applies a debuff to you in exchange for a bonus reward at the end. Curses range from enemies dealing more damage to you to your health constantly draining. Early on I activated high-level Curses thinking they would push me to improve. They didn't. I just died faster. The workaround was to only activate the Health Drain curse once I had a regeneration upgrade from the terminal, and even then I capped it at level two. Anything higher without the proper gear just slows your progress.
The combat itself has a stamina bar that governs your dodges, parries, and heavy attacks. Managing stamina is where most beginners fail. You can light attack indefinitely, but each dodge costs a chunk of your bar and each heavy attack costs even more. The trick is to light attack to build up the enemy's stagger meter, then follow up with a heavy when they're open. This cycle works against almost every regular enemy in the first five zones. Bosses require a different approach because their stagger meters are much larger and they recover faster. There are also Assist items you can equip before each run. These provide passive bonuses like increased gold drop rate, chance to find gems, or a small damage boost. I always run the gem finder assist because gems are used to buy special items from the Black Market during runs. Skipping this assist means you'll be walking away from free power-ups every time you visit that vendor. If you're stuck on a particular boss, the game gives you a few options. You can try a different weapon. You can upgrade your abilities at the terminal. You can grab a new Assist from the hub. Or you can wait and come back later. There is no level requirement system, but there is an implicit difficulty scaling that rewards players who learn the mechanics. The game does not tell you this directly, but your character gains small stat boosts from completing certain side quests, which effectively acts as a hidden progression system. One such quest involves helping Charon the ferryman. Complete it and you get a permanent five percent damage increase across all weapons. That five percent matters more than it sounds when you're trying to shave ten seconds off a boss fight.
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The game has an online leaderboards feature that tracks your fastest run times, most kills in a single run, and highest curse cleared. If speedrunning interests you at all, focus on the blade weapon with the Dash ability upgraded. The movement speed from that combination lets you skip most trash encounters and hit bosses faster than any other build. I clocked my first sub-twenty-minute run using this strategy after about twenty attempts. There is also a Co-op mode unlocked after completing the main story. Two players can team up for runs with shared health pools and combined damage output. It changes the pacing significantly. Enemies hit harder in co-op but so do you. I wouldn't recommend it for your first playthrough. Learn the game alone first. The solo experience teaches you the timing and patterns you will rely on regardless of which mode you choose later. For anyone looking to get Of Olympus The House Of Hades, it's available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store. The game is priced around twenty-five dollars and typically goes on sale for fifteen to eighteen dollars during major seasonal events. No microtransactions, no battle pass, no season pass content that you miss out on by waiting. The full game is there from the start.
