Honestly, zagreus discovering about his mother because of the narrator was the funniest shit ever

They popularized "the narrator talks about your every move" niche that i absolutely adore

I remember being so impressed by bastion like 10 years ago as a teen, that I wrote an email to sgg thanking them for it and got a response from Greg Kasavin. Was crazy

The familiarity in their music by using the same artists is such a positive to me. I know I'm playing a Supergiant game when the gorgeous talent of Darren Korb comes out. Some of the best music I've ever heard in any video game, let alone across four.

Every single person on the planet get this Pyre mechanic wrong. Your character only gets banished for the next round if he THROWS HIMSELF WITH THE BALL TO SCORE. Every character can throw only the ball to score, in this case, it doesn't get banished. Let everyone know they have been playing Pyre wrong

Pyre is so slept on and I think it is some of their best work.

Pyre is criminally underrated. Perhaps it was too atypical to be popular, but the story alone makes it my favourite visual novel.
And the music, the music. When I realized the lyrics of each liberation rite hymn are unique and pertain to the story and lore, it blew my mind. Them also being sung in english while the rest of the game's dialogue is a made up language too bears significance. And then there's the interactively constructed ending song.
Absolutely one of those times when I'd want to get amnesia and replay it all anew for the first time.

If I might offer an alternative impression about the difficulty of Hades. Most players are going to be less than great. If you design your game for the high level players, you lock out the low level players. Without mechanics like death defiance, I could not reach Hades at all. I laughed out loud when you said "Once you unlock death defiance, you are pretty much guaranteed to reach Hades every run." Let me tell you. I am about 20 hours in and when I unlocked this (a few hours in) it enabled me to beat Meg for the first time and without all 3 unlocked, I still stand no chance of beating Theseus. I have reached Hades twice. The first time I got extraordinarily lucky with boons and was able to cheese the hell out of every room leading up to Theseus and I had all 3 death defiances left to face Hades. I got to his second phase.

Hades is a great game. It is fun all the way through for both good and bad players. There is essentially no one I wouldn't recommend the game to. Even my parents that don't play games, given enough time with it, should be able to beat it. When I finally beat Hades, I will feel like I earned it. When you beat him, you felt like you earned it. I will be THANKFUL for the difficulty gradations with Pact of Punishment.

I'd like to dispute your analysis of Transistor's combat system for a moment: Transistor is a turn-based tactics game, which appears superficially to be an action-oriented isometric RPG. The real hint to this is that the enemy AI is insanely aggressive; it is simply not feasible to fight without using Turn(). You are not punished for using it either, the 'recovery period' is simply the enemy turn, and you  need to use your turn wisely to not end up in a disadvantageous position.

This system serves the story as well: in Bastion you are a hardened soldier, who kicks ass against wildlife and enemy combatants with a huge arsenal; the empowerment is clear. Contrasting, in Transistor you are a desperate disabled woman without any combat experience, fighting a swarm of world-devouring self-replicating robots; the disempowerment is core to the narrative!is

The key to success in Transistor's combat system is to explore the weapon/power system to find synergistic combos that can be quickly executed for massive damage, and then using the remainder of your turn to reposition; while keeping a single instance of the ability that can be used on the enemy turn available in your kit. Doing this is virtually necessary to complete the latter parts of the game where the difficulty ramps up massively, and the player is actively encouraged through the game's failure system that forces you to change loadout.

Transistor unlike Bastion had a significant and deep synergy system in combat, and you should probably have done some more research into strategy guides for the game before making this video, because there are some loadouts that are borderline gamebreaking and makes you feel like you're cheating the system: which is exactly the core narrative of the entire game.

Actually insane that every supergiant game has felt like a 10/10 at the time, but then their next game always improves on the last SO much that the old ones almost feel bad in comparison, but then also all 4 games are completely different... Crazy...

I was really impressed by the way they handled the source mythology in Hades too. As a mythology nerd, it was awesome to see someone not miss a single beat or cut a single corner. They really did their homework and it shows

There is one feature in Transistor that really improved my experience, and that was the use of  the controller's speaker, I get that this not really known because it's a PS4 feature, but it was awesome get this level of immersion.
The game sound get from tv normally, but when Red takes the transistor, the sword's voice get out from the controller, it makes perfect sense, this little detail make the game more immersive and was such a cool feature!

Every Supergiant Games has optional difficulty settings: Gods in Bastion, Limiters in Transistor, Titan Stars in Pyre and finally Heat in Hades. As you said, using them would enhance the gameplay, force players to use all available options and sometimes even enrich the story, like with Pyre, where losing is not the end.

However, I think all of these elements are optional, because Supergiant primarly wants all people to experience the story, reach the end. It's very hard to convince people to play a hard game. Not everyone enjoys high difficulty, even if it enhances the game. Players can feel frustration and leave the game. The main appeal of Supergiant's productions comes from the presentation, music, characters or plot, so it would be unwise to restrict access to them, by requiring higher skill from players.

Fo players playing for the story, it's a good thing that it's easy (comparing to other roguelikes) to reach the final boss in Hades. I usually don't enjoy most roguelikes or roguelites, because sometimes I feel frustration upon realising, that I need to go thru the entire game to have a chance at the final boss fight. I do love games like Dark Souls, where my progress is always going forward, and I can quickly return to a troublesome boss fight. For me, Hades strikes a good balance, I'm getting better and better with each run, and death is not frustrating, because it advances the plot. Still, I do try to increase the Heat, for more rewards and to challenge myself. In previous Supergiant's games, increasing the difficulty wasn't that interesting, that rewarding.

And so, I agree: Hades would be a better game (at least mechanically), a better roguelike, it it was harder, more fine-tuned.  However, it's good that Supergiant made it as it is, for the sake of broader audience, who primarly enjoy the plot.

One very important thing about the Heat levels in Hades you didn't mention - you don't need to play at Heat 1 to get Heat 1 rewards. You can immediately jump to higher heat and get all the reward tiers before it one at a time, so there is no need to grind difficulty if the game isn't challenging enough.

Man, great video, but I really think you exaggerated the difficulty problem in Hades. Bouncing off your death defiance complaint - you can turn it off if you really think that it lessens the difficulty. Or use stubborn defiance instead. And that also applies to the every other mirror bonus. I think that the true difficulty of this game lies in managing to balance mirror bonuses with contract punishments to create the optimal difficulty level for yourself.

Regarding the whole heat thing, I think that per-weapon heat is a better choice as you can still progress in heat with the weapon you are proficient while allowing to master other weapons on lower heat at a slower rate. I love bow and sword and I have high heat level on them, but I’m rotten with spear and separate level of heat with spear allows me to progress at a slower rate, but still progress. Were heat levels to be global, I would just not use spear at all as I would be wasting runs on not progressing.

To me, what truly makes Supergiant Games spectacular is the music.
All four games play different to each other, some more than others.  This results in people usually holding preference for one or two games compared to the others.  And I feel like this variety can be seen as a double edged sword.
But the one thing that all of these games have in common is their music. It's kind of hard to explain, but I feel like that there's a lot of true love put forth in the compositions.  The music in a SG game isn't just a backdrop to add atmosphere, it is an integral component that is seamlessly weaved into the narrative and gameplay.
There's just...something about the music that Darren Korb creates for these games that make it special and unique.
You hear the music and you instantly recognize that it's from Supergiant Games.

Also, the way Zagreus stares out to the rising sun as the acoustic version of Never to Return from Pyre was an awesome way to end the video.

I would become a full time pro Pyre player, were it possible.

I believe Bastion to be absolutely brilliant. I think one can’t quite decouple older games from the environment they were created in - seemless story telling, use of music and infusion of narrative into every aspect of the game (even the wave challenges - I see them as traditional game feature getting a narrative, rather then narrative with with weak gameplay). I personally thought the whole ending sequence was great and they expressed things like passage of time, distance and separation really well.

There is certain disconnect about the final stage which you didn’t touch on - entirety of the game until the final mission is happening when Kid is on he final journey to recover the last shard - it is Rucks telling this story to Zia while they wait for the Kid to return. There are multiple bits when one can gather that Rucks addresses Zia rather then the player.

The final stage is somewhat disconnected because Rucks doesn’t describe what is happening - he is unaware of what Kid is going through. I personally found it effective, rather then an issue. It is also why we can hear Zia talk at the very end - things are happening for real, rather then being retroactively described but Rucks - also the end is the only bit where we get to make real decisions (saving Zulf, how to use Bastion).

I couldn't agree less about the Transistor combat system - I used the turn all the time + if you enhance the functions you can use them while turn-recovering

In an age of imitations and iterations,  a YouTuber like NeverKnowsBest shouldn't be taken for granted.