As I approach 100 hours in the game (92 at the time of writing), I think it's clear that I love it by the fact that I've put more time into it than any other game in my collection.

This is my idea of a perfect Roguelite. Not only does it have all the difficulty and repeated death-and-retry mechanisms that I would expect, but it has an extremely robust advancement system, seeing you power up your character, Zagreus, acquire new weapons, power those weapons up, and decorate and enhance the Hub world, The House of Hades.

The different levels of the game give a wonderful sense of progression - attack patters you see in the first world appear in more advanced forms in later worlds, either with more powerful iterations of enemies, different enemies adopting the attack, and the bosses adopting yet more powerful forms. This gives the game an excellent learning curve, teaching you as you progress, without hand-holding or giving hints.

The combat is smooth and responsive. If you slip and take damage, you know it's down to your timing, not iffy controls. The boons you gain from the Olympian gods as you progress offer the variety in each run, and combined with the six weapons on offer, not to mention their upgrades, you have thousands of combinations you can try out. You'll have your favourites, but sometimes they're just not on offer in a run, so you learn something new. The game also incentivises changing weapons by giving one weapon an attribute that means it generates more of a particular currency if you use it for your next run.

I think the biggest standout elements for me, however, above all the excellent qualities I have described, are the voice-acting and the lore. The voices in this are stellar, giving each character their own personality, and they are all very distinct, despite several voice-over artists working on multiple characters. Both during and between each run, the characters provide lore, whimsy, heart, emotion and drive to the game, and it is this that holds it head and shoulders above all other Roguelites I have tried to date.