“Death to Chronos.” This is the unbreakable vow of the demigoddess Melinoë, daughter of Hades and protagonist of 2025’s critically acclaimed Hades II. While thoughtfully engaging with Greek mythology, developer Supergiant Games still takes many creative liberties as they reknit these ancient characters and tales into a fresh narrative tapestry akin to the ambitious crossover of Greek and Norse mythology in the God of War franchise. This approach bears out in Melinoë’s portrayal, as there’s little known about her other than she’s a chthonic goddess, yet another child born out of wedlock from Zeus, and a bringer of nightmares and madness. She retains her associations with sorcery and the subconscious in Supergiant’s game, but is given an entirely new purpose: taking back her family and their rightful rule of the underworld from Chronos’s clutches.
Hades II is rich with tried-and-true themes like the dichotomy of fate versus choice and what it takes to break cycles of violence. But there’s also a smaller thread regarding the purpose and dignity of humanity, which was made in the image of the Olympian gods. As a result, Hades II serves as fertile ground on which to engage with the concept of the imago Dei—a central doctrine of the Christian faith that is too often loosely defined and historically misunderstood—in theological anthropology.
Playing as Melinoë, you’ll fight the legions of Chronos down in Tartarus, with classic villains like the cyclops Polyphemus and the sea monster Scylla showing up. When you finally turn your attention to Mount Olympus in order to aid your family against an equally fearsome contingent of foes, you come across a shocking revelation: Prometheus, the Titan of foresight and creator of humanity, has joined your enemy’s ranks.
“Mortals!” he shouts while standing across from you on a stone dais, the raging fires from below casting an angry red glow around the perimeter. “Poor sods created in the image of the gods, yet forced to be inferior, so that they could never achieve what my master and I now intend.” A blaze far hotter burns in his eyes. “Mortals live only to suffer. As I’m responsible for that, I sought to take some of their suffering from them. And redistribute it to all of you.”
Hades II serves as fertile ground on which to engage with the concept of the imago Dei—a central doctrine of the Christian faith that is too often loosely defined and historically misunderstood
In the oldest sources of Greek mythology, Prometheus makes humans by molding them in the form of the gods with clay and water before breathing life into them. (Sound familiar?) Zeus has plans for them to be servants, so he renders them weak and mortal. This wasn’t what Prometheus expected for his creation, though, so when Zeus demands his first animal sacrifice from humans, the Titan helps them trick the god of lightning into taking a worthless one so that they can be fed by the real sacrifice. Zeus punishes humanity by taking fire away, all but dooming them to suffer and starve in darkness. Prometheus won’t stand for that, so he scales Mount Olympus and abscondes with a flickering flame which he gives to humans, permanently endowing them with the power to advance socially and technologically. Incensed, Zeus directs his ire entirely toward Prometheus. He chains the Titan to a mountainside and sends an eagle to tear his flesh and consume his liver. Every day. For eternity.
What makes Prometheus so admired in Greek mythology is how he foreknew the consequences of his actions and still chose to suffer for humanity’s sake. Whether or not he was freed from his plight varies across accounts, but in Hades II, his story continues with him siding with Chronos yet acting as an anti-hero. His role forces Melinoë and the player to confront how unusually cruel the mortals’ suffering (and his own) have been at the Olympian gods’ hands. The complexity deepens as the game pulls from other ancient material that describes five ages of humanity. The first, overseen by Chronos, was a “Golden Age” of bliss, prosperity, and long life. Hades II muddles the idyllic portrait of this bygone era, suggesting that humans may have stagnated under authoritarian rule. Even if that were so, Chronos could’ve been a more benevolent ruler at the time than Zeus ever was. “Before the gods re-shaped the world to be like this, mortals did not have to die in agony and waste away within this pit [of Tartarus],” Chronos says. “A simpler age, and all the better for it.” Prometheus doesn’t expect Chronos to be loyal to him, since he once sided with the gods to defeat the Titans, but he regrets it dearly, professing to do everything on behalf of humans by ending their imposed dependence on the gods.
While some gods like Apollo and Poseidon play around with mortals’ lives for fun, others like Hestia and Nemesis seriously reckon with their family’s failures concerning mortals. “We ought to have been kinder to mortals, really,” Hestia admits. “I’ve always tried to look after the living. But our family’s best known for looking after ourselves.” Prometheus drills that fact into Melinoë: her kind have a reputation for disregarding and degrading mortals. And despite having a kind and generous heart, Melinoë herself can’t escape the shadow of this inherited perspective. In one rhetorical spar with Prometheus, she has a lapse in character so astonishing it’s nearly comical: “Why do you care so much for mortals, anyhow?” she asks. “Their lives are short, their flesh is weak. Only in death do many of them finally begin to gain some sense.” Most players will protest that she can’t possibly think that since Melinoë isn’t that far behind Prometheus in her love for, and loyalty to, mortals.
With the underworld off limits, mortals’ souls (nicknamed “Shades”) now take refuge in Melinoë’s abode: a hidden campsite called the Crossroads. You can send Shades who are lost in the wild to this commune, and even furnish it with renovations and amenities to make everyone feel at home. Most Shades appear as ghosts in various shades of green with nothing but different heights and proportions to distinguish them; they’re practically nameless, formless, and voiceless. However, a handful manifest as they looked and spoke in life, usually legends of near deific renown like Achilles. This is reinforced in how you can not only proffer nectar and ambrosia (gifts originally meant for the gods) to them, but also romance one of them. “I’ve known Shades such as you, and Odysseus,” Melinoë tells Icarus; “Spirits strong enough to hold their form well beyond death. You’re close enough to gods!”
A unique case of an eternal mortal is Arachne, cursed by Athena to be a spider for daring to be a better seamstress than the goddess. In befriending her, Melinoë’s heart breaks every time Arache debases herself. “You’re not lowly!” Melinoë insists. “I don’t know anybody like you, Arachne! And I’m glad you’re you. Exactly as you are.” In taking time to know and serve mortals, Melinoë arrives at a crossroads within herself concerning what humans were destined for and she seeshow some really had sense in life as they do in death.
The purpose and dignity of mortals are at stake in this contest for their identity between Prometheus and the Olympians, both in the game and Greek mythology. But that’s nothing new, being an echo of another ideological struggle in the ancient Middle East between the God of Israel and other Mesopotamian deities. Here, we can see how the Hebrew Bible planted the seeds for a radically liberating version of what it meant to be made in the image of the gods.
We can see how the Hebrew Bible planted the seeds for a radically liberating version of what it meant to be made in the image of the gods.
Like Roman emperors, Mesopotamian kings were deified, not usually as gods themselves but often as offspring or direct representatives of the divine. Archeological discoveries tied to Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian rulers had statues and inscriptions telling subjects that their kings not only imaged the gods but also that the material objects fashioned in their kings’ likenesses served as “range extenders” for their divine rule to places where they couldn’t be physically present (e.g., the denarius with Caesar’s head in Matthew 22). In all cases, these were tsalmu—an Akkadian word resembling the Hebrew word tselem, which typically described material idols in the Hebrew Bible. It’s rarely used outside this context, but a bizarre exception is found in Genesis 1:26-27, where humans are created in the tselem—the “form,” “phantom,” or “image”—of God.
In his Genesis 1–11 International Exegetical Commentary, Old Testament scholar David M. Carr writes that the aforementioned passage “represents a creative critique alternative to Mesopotamian (and other) theology around cult images. Rather than endorsing… human-made clay (often) anthropomorphic statues as images of God, it depicts actual humans—long recognized as divinely made in older cosmogonic traditions—as the truly God-made divine images” (90). In other words, the image of God isn’t a special status inherent to or conferred upon royalty, but part of being human. Subsequently, Israelites thought that any material idols were pointless because people were already flesh-and-blood “idols” made to represent God.
Similarly, that’s why Prometheus was the odd one out as a champion for all humans since they were made to image gods, but you won’t find any such divine advocates in Middle–Eastern creation accounts. The Babylonian Enuma Elish tells how the world was created when the chief god Marduk defeated the chaos dragon Tiamat. After Qingu, Tiamat’s primary accomplice, is killed, his blood is mixed with mud to form humans for the singular purpose of slave labor. Israelites in Babylonian exile would not only have experienced such enslavement firsthand, but also been flabbergasted by their captors’ view of kings, who weren’t as central to Israelite culture or politics. Kings were never to be worshipped but rather, were expected to uphold and live under God’s will along with everyone else.
Old Testament scholar J. Richard Middleton writes how there was “an early anti-monarchial strain in Israel’s tribal confederacy (illustrated by Gideon’s refusal of kingship in Judges 8:22–23 and by Samuel’s opposition to the people’s request for a king in I Samuel 8:4–22) as well as to later (9th to 7th century) prophetic critique of the monarchy in the name of allegiance to Yahweh” (The Liberating Image?, 22). So, if the image of God is uniquely democratized and paves the way for equality in the Hebrew Bible, what about the image of God distinguishes people from all other living things?
Reason, intelligence, creativity, love, spirituality, marriage, procreation—these attributes and practices are commonly offered as uniquely human. As well-intended as these speculations are, they weren’t in view for ancient scribes. To them, the image of God was functional in nature, a charge to steward creation with and on behalf of God, founded in Genesis and echoed in Psalm 8. The late biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann affirmed this in his Theology of the Old Testament: “[The image of God] does not constitute a major theological datum for Israel’s reflection on the topic… that discussion is evoked by subsequent theological categories, especially Pauline ….” (452). Biblical scholar Pete Enns—paraphrasing Old Testament scholar John Walton—summarizes how the above qualities don’t “define what image of God means in Genesis. Rather, those qualities are tools that serve humans in their image-bearing role.” We’re clued in to how we use these in God’s call to subdue and have dominion in Genesis 1:28.
Greek mythology envisions this as the building of civilizations with art, technology, and the like. In the Hebrew Bible, it’s not clear what kabash (“subdue”) should entail since it has a large semantic range implying gentle stewardship in some places (similar to cultivating a garden) and forceful conquest in others. The word radah (“dominion”), meanwhile, implies “an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery,” as Hebrew translator Robert Alter writes. Radah even has royal connotations; you could say Adam and Eve were christened to be co-regents of God, and since they’re expected to act like him, we have to all but look at their first task in Eden: “to till it and keep it.” Examples abound in the Hebrew Bible of God exemplifying this approach in his covenantal care and rule for the prosperity of his people and justice for all. Since Jesus lived out the fullest and truest life as a paradigmatic example of the image of God, we must understand why he continually upset people’s expectations by choosing to not exercise power over people as a king. Instead, he leveraged power for people as a servant.
This is in total opposition to the Olympians in Hades II, who cling to power at mortals’ expense. But Prometheus predicts that a new Golden Age will dawn for humanity in which it determines its own destiny, and he’s proven right when the Fates deem it so. An ominous warning bookends the game, however, announcing that “gods do not go quietly, and history repeats.” That is true for all oppressive empires and kingdoms, those “authorities [and] cosmic powers of this present darkness” who have too often hoarded and abused the image of God. Many Israelite and Judahite kings, as well as spiritually anointed judges like Samson, attest to this pattern. And for all his admirable traits, the same goes for Prometheus. He deceived rather than mediated with Zeus to represent humanity; in Hades II, we see him overcome with retributive violence in his bitter rage toward the gods.
Even still, one could argue that Prometheus serves as a shadow of God and Christ in Greek mythology. He molded and gave the breath of life to humanity, endowing them with the image of gods to subdue the earth, and brought people out of enslavement by selflessly laying down his life so they could flourish. “Don’t you see?” Prometheus asks Melinoë in a moment of moral lucidity. “So long as they suffer, so shall we all.” And this is exactly what Jesus articulated in his ministry, as Middleton beautifully puts it:
Thus, the life and characteristic teaching of Jesus… point to a canonical trajectory from rule to compassionate service. That is, Jesus explicitly exemplifies what is at least implicit in Genesis 1 and often explicit in the Old Testament, namely that the right use of power is not oppressive control of others, but their liberation or empowerment. […] Citing what is in all likelihood an early hymn, the apostle [Paul] argues [in Philippians 2:5–11] that if Jesus, as the unique imago Dei, used his divine power and sovereignty not for his own interests, but to serve others, even unto death, then the Christian community… should have among itself the same ‘mind’ of compassionate self-giving. In the New Testament, imago Dei as rule becomes imitatio Christi (23-24).
Christians must give of themselves to spark the everlasting embers of the imago Dei within themselves, in order that they can shine the light of Christ upon all people so that it warms their bodies and souls. Maybe that light will be angled in such a powerful way that it melts some of the shackles and chains binding others below their high calling. Perhaps it will even stoke those divine embers within them so they can join a growing procession of living torches who bear these exalted flames out into the world, preparing the way to rule—to serve—as joint heirs in Christ.
“Fire spreads; burns anything that stands in its path,” Prometheus says. “The gods sought to imprison it, but I set it loose. Now at last, we each are free. And burning still.”
