I have a problem, folks. In any game where there are a billion resources that can filter into a million recipes, I always find myself split halfway between the actual game I want to play and some half-maintained wiki page. When Hades 2’s early access began to unravel its massive list of dozens of recipes with their own constituent ingredients, I feared I’d suffer the same fate.
That’s not to say I don’t try, you understand. I’ve played Stardew Valley and printed PDFs of community centre requirements. I’ve taken notes while playing Disco Elysium—and generally, that’s been fine. But if I need to keep track of the differences between ordinary cloth and Saintsflax or whatever, I’ll bounce off your game hard.
Fortunately, Hades 2 solved this with the Forget-Me-Not incantation completely, and I recommend you get it basically right away. Let me break it down for you.
Early on in the game, you can unlock the Forget-Me-Not incantation by doing a bit of hubble, bubble, toiling and trouble at the cauldron in the centre of the hub. This allows you to, with a single button press, mark any recipe you want to work towards. This isn’t just a reminder or a to-do list, though.
Marking an incantation or weapon as a Forget-Me-Not will place a corresponding symbol on not only the tool you need to bring (since you can only take one) on your next stint into Hades/Olympus, it’ll also mark doors along your journey with a sticker that says “hey, dumb dumb, the thing you were looking for is through door number two.”
This completely destroys any risk of getting overwhelmed, and I can’t thank Supergiant enough. Instead of fumbling through reams of notes, you can just select something you want to work towards and guide Melinoë towards the helpful pointer on your next run. No mess, no fuss, no “god damnit, I needed to bring a pickaxe on this run and I’m already three layers deep”.
You can even open your list of Forget-Me-Nots at any time and remove them via the inventory menu, which means that you don’t have to go back to the place you marked them to remove the recipe.
While I’m sure other games have similar set-and-forget shortcuts, I don’t think I’ve seen one so thoroughly good at solving the problem it wants to fix. I even appreciate that it’s an incantation, so if you’re the kind of person who buys a fancy new planner every other week and likes to squirrel things away in your little lists, you can do that instead.
It’s but one of the many things that’s caught me off-guard about Hades 2—because damn, does it feel complete for an Early Access game, barring some missing story elements and a handful of unfinished artwork. As fellow PC Gamer Tyler Colp so rightfully pointed out, it’s already worth getting your mitts stuck into.