The game Hades is often cited as an example of the rogue-lite genre, a format where players repeat gameplay levels while developing new skills and abilities to progress in the game. In the game’s music, motives are recombined and restated in a manner that suggests looping, resulting in an underlying structure of regularity of phrase and formal section. In contrast, though, this is varied by an ongoing process of rhythmic irregularity that lengthens or shortens the phrase, distorting the looping process into what will be termed a ‘pseudo-loop.’
This paper will examine how processes of local motivic variation in two tracks from Hades—“Out of Tartarus” and “Rage of the Myrmidons”—undermine the regularity of the looping process and of pulse, generating musical instabilities and negating expected regularities of meter. Such instabilities reflect parallelisms between modalities of soundtrack, gameplay, setting, and narrative. As a result, Hades is not only rogue-lite in its gameplay but also in its music. The soundtrack pulls from compositional procedures grounded in both video game music and heavy metal, a conscious choice the game’s composer, Darren Korb, makes in depicting a style he terms “Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween.”