Hades 2, the followup to Supergiant’s original highly-acclaimed roguelike, still has no release date following its 2022 reveal. Rather than joining the ranks of those perpetual “coming soon” games like Hollow Knight: Silksong, however, it seems you might be able able to play Hades II sooner than you’d think.
Just today, Supergiant opened up the Hades II Technical Test, which serves as a way to let real gamers in the wild (and not on Supergiant’s QA payroll) try out an early build of the game. Sure, it may be unpaid QA work, but you’re getting to play Hades 2 early! If you’re salivating over this offer like I am, signing up for the playtest is simplicity itself (as long as you have a Steam account, that is).
How to play Hades 2 early
Fortunately, signing up for the Hades 2 playtest is nowhere near as labyrinthine as the likes of Skate 4. Rather than an external service, the Technical Test is hosted through Steam itself. This means that all you need to do is navigate to Hades 2‘s Steam page, scroll right past that heartbreaking “TBA” release date, and hit “Request Access” under “Join the Hades II Playtest”. If you’re selected—presumably at random, as Supergiant did not provide any kind of criteria—you’ll get an automated email from Steam outlining further instructions in the near future.
A Steam community post from Supergiant also outlined recommended specs for the playtest, including 4GB of RAM and a dual-core processor. It seems that just like the original, Hades 2 will be pretty light as far as system requirements go—perhaps expected, given the CPU-friendly isometric perspective, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.
Also included with that post were a few caveats about exactly how the playtest will work. It will only encompass the first area of the game and its mechanics, roughly the equivalent to Hades‘ Tartarus. Once you run through it a few times, the game will “gently” suggest putting it down and doing something else. Most notably of all, however, is what comes after the Technical Test: Early Access, which will presumably offer even more content as the game continues to develop and evolve.
Unfortunately, Early Access doesn’t mean the full game is on the horizon. Hades famously spent two years in Early Access, and it’s all too easy to imagine the same thing happening with its bigger, more complicated sequel. In the absolute worst-case scenario, we might not see a release until 2026—so get ready to spend a lot of time with this tech test.
