What a roguelite teaches you that an FPS does not

There was a moment in Hades when I realised I was not going to “finish” the game: the game finishes itself. All you do is keep improving the tool — the Daedalus hammer, the build, your reaction to a boss pattern — until the final trial becomes easier than the first.

Iteration as the main mechanic

What sets a good roguelite apart is not the combat or the graphics. It is the honesty of its loop: every run is a controlled experiment with known variables, a measurable outcome and an informed next iteration.

In Hades you fail, you learn one specific thing about Hades, and you come back better prepared. In Dead Cells, same. In Returnal, same. The learning curve is not a straight line — it is a spiral that tightens with every loop.

That same shape — a tightening spiral — is what I do when I deploy a new detection on the SIEM. I deploy, measure, tune, redeploy. Each cycle leaves the system a little better, and if I work well the spiral tightens fast. If I work badly, it does not tighten at all.

Three lessons I take from Hades

1. The boss changes, the pattern does not. Megaera always opens the same way. Once learned, no surprise. Same with most real-world TTPs: malware changes, behaviour does not.
2. No good run without a previous bad one. Background work happens while you lose. Winning is the consequence, not the practice.
3. Meta-progress matters more than progress. What you unlock between runs is worth more than what you achieve inside one run. In security: the rules you leave written are worth more than the incident you closed today.

What I am playing now

• Hades II (early access), by inertia.
• Balatro, a roguelite disguised as poker. Addictive and honest.
• The Witcher 3 again, because sometimes what you need is not a tight loop but a world that lets you breathe.

And the FPS

I dropped them years ago. Not because I got bored, but because I stopped learning. And that, in any game — and outside any game — is the signal that it is time to change tables.