Thread by @dancingengie

Now, @SupergiantGames' #HadesGame is damn good. One of its best features is its ever-evolving story, where every death and every retry reveals just a little more of it. This has led many, inc. me, to wonder just how many voiceover lines are there. Thread:

To start with, I looked at the game's VO file itself, VO.fsb, which stands tall at a whopping 669 MB. FSB stands for FMOD Sample Bank Format. FMOD is a wide-spread sound effect and music API that's integrated into many game engines.

I tried popping .fsb file into Audacity, whereupon Audacity informed me that it considers this file "raw data" and needs to be imported in a different way. So it's basically insinuating that FMOD is in some way encrypted, and the engine can decrypt it, or play it correctly in RT.

So. Importing the VO file as raw data with VOX encoding reveals an 8.5 HOUR LONG audio file (see bottom of image) consisting of static.
I assume this is the entirety of Hade's voice acting, laid out back-to-back. But it's still encrypted.

Fortunately, the engine stored a convenient little file in the same folder as our .fsb file - VO.h. It appears to be a definition file, letting the game know which files are in the sample bank for easy access. Or something along these lines.

Exploring this file grants us access to all file names the game needs to the define, and, by extension, each VO file. Since every line represents one file, we can just scroll down and see that HADES has 19,523 definitions for audio files.
But I wanted to double-check.

Now, FMOD exists since '95. Surely, SURELY, someone would have an FSB extractor.
And yup, one exists. Importing this monster of an .fsb file almost crashed the software, but eventually I managed to get in and export ALL VO FILES.

There they are, laid bare. Still encrypted and filled with static, but there you have it - 19,523 files, or around 8.5 straight hours of VO.
Disclaimer: there could be more VO files lying about that I couldn't find, but this number is pretty staggering.

How does this compare to other SG games?

Transistor, a linear narrative, had 2,683 VO lines (13% of Hades).
Pyre, a longer, party-based RPG with an ensemble cast, had 12,836 VO lines (65% of Hades).

If you had any doubt Hades is SG's biggest undertaking yet, there you go.

Zagreus, the player character, and his father Hades, the antagonist, are responsible for 49.5% of all VO files.

The character with the least lines, the murmuring boatman Charon, still has around 100 lines.