Eurydice Sings: Revoicing a Musical Myth in Hades

One of the most memorable moments in Hades is a strikingly ludomusical one. On entering a chamber in the game’s second region, instead of the usual percussive, metal-inflected music that signals the presence of infernal foes, the player is greeted with a lone voice singing a forlorn song, accompanied by discreet, lyre-like strumming. The voice, as the player learns on entering the chamber, belongs to Eurydice, a figure best known for her role in Greek myth as the wife and muse of Orpheus, the greatest musician of all time. Eurydice’s song in Hades strongly disrupts the ludic flow a confident player will likely have reached by this point, inviting them to pause and consider the song and its source. This paper argues that Eurydice’s song enacts an Orphic moment, rearranging the components of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to present a fundamentally new interpretation of the story that thoughtfully challenges assumptions on gender and voice in video games. Drawing on Michel Chion’s writing on the acousmatic voice and the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, the paper analyzes how the song disrupts not just the musical and ludic processes of Hades, but revoices the myth more globally as it appears in both musical and ludic representations. In contrast to her role in the myth and to the historical position of female characters in video games, Hades’s Eurydice is initially heard but not seen, presented instead as an acousmatic, authorial voice in the game. At the same time, Eurydice’s song might be seen to register and vary a role commonly ascribed to women’s singing voices in games: of altering the world through sound. Whereas in most games this transformative power comes from the ability of the singing voice to alter the gameworld diegetically, Eurydice’s song transcends the screen to disrupt the processes of the game itself, as it is experienced by the player. The song leaves us, like Orpheus’s audiences in Ovid, subdued and transfigured by the singing voice.