Midautumn builds upon Hades to explore an Asian diaspora experience

Hello! Since today sees the celebration of 2023's Mid-Autumn Festival, we decided to take another look at Midautumn, which Liv wrote about beautifully back in June. Enjoy!

Roguelikes have a hell of a reputation: unforgiving, inscrutable, and not for the faint of heart. After all, the genre is a lineage of games that emerged from Rogue, an ASCII game known for being notoriously challenging. But the genre's penchant for loops and repetition - which stems from its games' deadly combination of brutal combat, limited health and permadeath—also makes it a rather unorthodox medium for developers looking to deliver a narrative-driven experience. This is a mould that the roguelike Hades has already broken with its atypical accessibility and multi-layered storytelling, and it's this particular formula that Midautumn is inspired by. To its team of developers, Hades has paved the way for the game to impart a story about an Asian diaspora community, faced with the threat of gentrification.

"We were very excited by the idea of roguelikes in telling stories, in types of stories that are harder to tell," says creator Sherveen Uduwana. "What [Hades] opened up for us was, suddenly there are a lot more people that are familiar with some of these conventions and mechanics of how you tell stories in roguelikes, so it's doing some heavy lifting for us in being able to tell a less well-tread story in games."

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