I want to tell you something about the word "failure" that took me longer than I'd like to admit to fully internalise. It is not the opposite of success. It is, in most contexts, a prerequisite for it. This is not an original observation — it has been made by every motivational speaker, self-help author, and LinkedIn thought leader since the medium was invented, usually while standing in front of a slide that reads "FAIL FORWARD" in very large font.
I know all of this. I have read the books. I have watched the TED talks. I still, reliably, feel terrible when I fail at something. And so, I suspect, do you. Knowing a thing and actually operating from it are, it turns out, different skills entirely.
What I didn't expect was for a game about repeatedly dying in the underworld to be the thing that finally made it click.
The Game
Hades is a roguelike action game developed by Supergiant Games, released in full in 2020 after an early access period. You play as Zagreus, son of Hades, attempting to escape from the Underworld. You fight through procedurally generated rooms toward the surface. When you die — and you will, many times — you return to the House of Hades, have a conversation, and go again. The story advances whether you succeed or fail, which is the crucial mechanical point.
It won virtually every game of the year award available in 2020. Not because it was the flashiest or the biggest, but because it is almost perfectly designed. And the thing it is most perfectly designed around is the experience of repeated failure as a mechanism of progress.
The Psychology of Failure Tolerance
Research on resilience and what psychologists call "failure tolerance" — the ability to persist through setbacks without significant damage to motivation or self-concept — is fairly consistent in its findings. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's landmark research on mindset (published in multiple peer-reviewed papers and synthesised in her widely replicated work on growth vs fixed mindsets) showed that people who attribute failure to effort and strategy — things that can change — persist longer and perform better than those who attribute it to ability — which feels fixed.
The problem is that in daily life, failure often carries social, financial, or emotional weight that makes it genuinely difficult to frame as "just data." Losing a job, ending a relationship, failing an exam — these things have consequences beyond the event itself. The feedback loop is slow, the stakes are real, and the costs of repeated failure compound.
Hades strips failure of almost all its collateral damage and leaves only the information.
Each run teaches you something. A new enemy pattern. A better combination of weapons and abilities. A slightly more efficient route. The character explicitly acknowledges what you've learned. The narrative rewards the attempt, not the outcome. And crucially — you can apply that learning immediately, in the next run, which starts about thirty seconds after your death screen.
When you fail at something meaningful, what's your honest first instinct?
Research note: A 2019 study in Nature Communications (Eskreis-Wenger et al.) found that people learn more from their own failures than from their successes — but typically avoid revisiting failure experiences because of the emotional cost. Hades elegantly sidesteps this avoidance by making the return to failure the only available action. You cannot choose not to try again. You can only choose how.
The Conversation Mechanic
Here is the specific design element that earns its place in this post. Every time Zagreus dies and returns to the House of Hades, there are conversations available with the other characters. Nyx. Achilles. Megaera. Characters who comment on your recent run, react to your progress, and develop their own storylines based on how many attempts you've accumulated. The relationships deepen with repeated failure. The house becomes more of a home the more times you return to it.
This is not accidental. It is the game encoding a specific truth: the people around you are still there after you fail. The relationship doesn't reset. In fact, it often deepens precisely because you needed to come back.
I am aware this is a metaphor. I am also aware that it is a very good one.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
I failed a job interview once — badly enough that I replayed specific moments of it for about three days afterward with the special kind of internal cringe that only secondhand embarrassment can produce. I did not apply to that company again. I applied to two fewer companies in the following month than I'd planned. The failure had not just been unpleasant; it had made the next attempt harder.
In Hades, the equivalent would be: dying to a boss, and then having the game make the next run's starting room harder as punishment for the attempt. This is not what happens. What happens is you are slightly stronger, slightly more informed, and the boss has not changed at all. You just know it better now.
The framing matters enormously. In the game, death is how you learn. In most real contexts, we have constructed a world where failure is how you fall behind. Dismantling that framing — even partially — turns out to be genuinely difficult, and genuinely worth doing.
Play Hades. Die many times. Notice how quickly "I failed" becomes "I know that now." Then see if you can take that sentence anywhere else.
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