Week 6 Run: Death as Narrative Engine
Hades and the games that stopped treating failure as an interruption to the story and started making it the story
29 March 2027
Most games treat death as downtime: a screen you wait through before the game resumes. Hades treats every death as the next beat of the story. That’s not free — it requires the narrative to be built to absorb repetition from the ground up.
Before the session#
Play or watch enough of a run-based narrative game to see how it handles a death mid-story, and bring the moment where it either worked or didn’t.
In the session#
We push on where the technique breaks: games where narrative death-as-progress would undercut the stakes it’s trying to build, and why.
Afterwards#
Nothing due this week. Use the room to keep working on the checkpoint-design brief before it’s due in week 9.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can explain how Hades reframes a run's death as narrative progress
- you can name a second game that folds failure into its plot rather than pausing it
- you have a counter-example where this technique would not work
Teaching team
- Idris Fenntutor