Aucune bande sonore ne le fait comme Hades 2

Résumé de l'actualité

Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.

I have not played Hades 2 since October 4 of 2025. That's not because I "fell out of love" with the game or whatever, I simply plugged 65 hours into it, beat the 'main story', had a jolly old time, and went on to play other things. But one thing about it has persisted: its soundtrack. God, I can't get Hades 2's soundtrack out of my head.

I'm going to outline some of my favorites, but before I do that, I do want to give flowers to the more ambient tunes on Darren Korb's masterwork, here. Edge of Erebus, Spider Silk, and particularly The Song of Sirens—perhaps the most faithful rendition of their mythological namesake before Korb, genius that he is, clubs you over the head with a rock band.

What really cements Hades 2's soundtrack in my mind, however, are its show-stoppers. These boss themes are the real events, so much so that Korb will often bring in a guest musician to set the track on fire.

The entire collection of Scylla and the Sirens' songs are just excellent: Coral Crown, I Am Gonna Claw (Out Your Eyes then Drown You to Death), Rock and a Hard Place (feat. Charybdis), and Bewitching Eyes.

If just one of these tracks existed, I'd call it inspired: But having Scylla become your number one hater after a few defeats, writing a bespoke diss track and then following that up with Charybdis performing death metal screams is both a really funny joke and also a complete and utter earworm. Erin Yvette's got an excellent set of pipes, too, which really ties the whole thing together.

The Titan of Time is already a great boss theme on its own. Chronos' signature percussion being a ticking clock is an obvious choice, sure, but sometimes the obvious choices are the best ones, and it still makes clever use of time signatures to great effect (like some of my other favorite videogame music).

But The End of Time, which plays after unlocking the Dissolution of Time incantation to put him down for good? The drums on this thing, good lord. Guest star Louis Cole, who I'm just now finding out is also a bassist and a keyboardist, goes in on those drums like a dog ripping apart a piece of meat. Again, turning drums into the leading instrument for the Titan of Time is a no-brainer—but it's the execution that matters, and holy crap. You owe it to yourself to give this one a listen.

And yet, even for minor bosses, Darren Korb busts out the big guns. Which is wild, because while The Sightless Shepherd is a boss fight for an important character in Greek mythology (Polyphemus is the cyclops that Odessyus blinded, pissed off, and revealed his true name to—a mistake, by all accounts, since his papa is Poseidon) he's also just the first boss in the surface area.

But Sam Gendel absolutely tears this theme up with his saxophone solo, a piece of music I literally used during one of our top 100 debates to try and get the PC Gamer team to vote for Hades 2. And while it didn't work, I still had everyone in the voice call's heads bobbing.

Olympus Aflame plays during the Vow of Rivals boss fight where you need to take on both Heracles and Prometheus at the same time, and while it's perhaps the most bog-standard fantasy of all of these soundtracks, it's still earned a permanent spot on some of my TTRPG playlists for that reason. It's sort of the perfect encapsulation of Olympus, orchestral trumpets reaching a feverish, panicked crescendo as their mountain crumbles down around them.

As we've seen with some of these other tracks, Korb's composition can get a little showy, but Olympus Aflame feels to me the proof of mastery over the 'basics' that allows him to go buck wild with other entries on the game's soundtrack.