Thunder Lotus Games is back with the forthcoming 33 Immortals, a significantly more violent portrayal of the afterlife than their previous game Spiritfarer. It just released in Early Access, and I have some Thoughts.

The elevator pitch is that it’s a massively-multiplayer cooperative hack-n-slash roguelite where 33 player lobbies band together to fight their way through hell, purgatory, and heaven somewhat as depicted in The Divine Comedies.

It’s still early – and definitely has a ways to go before release – but what’s available right now pretty much delivers on that initial pitch. Runs consist of dumping you and 32 other players into random locations across a pretty massive overworld, where you do top-down battle with various demons and tortured souls. After fighting for awhile it will open up “torture chambers” across the map, which are 6 player instanced dungeons where you have to kill off waves of enemies and then some elites, in exchange for guaranteed powerful relic upgrades. After you escape it’s another round of overworld fighting, another round of torture chambers, then everyone who’s still alive is called to fixed extraction points before an immense boss encounter.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is based on your weapon choice. There are 4 in the game right now – sword, daggers, bow, staff – but they claim there will be TEN more in the full game. The weapons basically work how you’d expect them to. X for light attacks, hold to charge a heavy attack, Y for a special move, dodge to get out of the way of attacks. You have an ultimate ability on a VERY long cooldown, but you can’t activate it yourself: they all require multiple players to join in to trigger them. Like the sword takes 2 other players to activate and applies a shield to all 3 players who link up.

One thing that the game presently does a sorta bad job of is to convey JUST how important cooperative play is, and I hope they improve the tutorialization for this, because it’s absolutely critical. Normally in this kind of game you might think, “oh, I should run over here by myself to make sure I greedily keep all the kills to myself, so I’ll ignore the pack of other players and group up only when I have to”, but in 33 Immortals you will fail miserably if you try to solo stuff.

The game is intentionally designed explicitly for co-op play, without grouping up you’ll barely do enough damage to kill random mobs on the overworld at a reasonable pace, everything will seem like an unnecessary struggle, you won’t be able to use your ult, and when you die you’ll die alone. Having other players dealing damage obviously makes quicker work of enemies, but it also is required to activate your combo meter, which only goes up when you’re dealing damage to enemies other players are also damaging. The “Co-strikes” meter also progressively increases your crit chance, and with some perks and intentional building towards it can lead to massive increases in damage output.

There are also little things scattered across the overworld map that just casually require explicit cooperation. Little runes that need 3 players to simultaneously stand on them, shrines that require multiple players to unlock, chests locked by a huge elite enemy that you’d spend all game trying to take down by yourself. Even basic stuff like your ability to heal after doing a dungeon, you get a partial heal by being near someone who activates the healing shrine. It’s a little infuriating that they don’t explain this, or don’t shout about it loud enough, because my first couple runs were crazy frustrating with my solo DPS being so pitifully low, but then I realized just how much more effective you are in a team and had a significantly more enjoyable time.

After the “ascension battle” – which is basically an extraction – you proceed to the truly enormous boss of the zone, where whoever’s still left standing will have to work together to chunk through 10 or so health bars while contending with raid-boss-style mechanics and waves and waves of bonus adds.

Even this early on the game offers some pretty solid opportunities for both between-run and in-run buildcrafting. There’s permanent progression from feats (ex: defeat 10 mobs with the daggers, unlock the compendium for 30 enemies, etc), and buildcrafting from perks (start each run with +1 vitality, or do guaranteed crits once you hit 30 co-strikes, etc), and eventually weapon modifiers that significantly change gameplay. In-run you have a ton of currencies to pick up: bones (ephemeral currency for heals, relic re-rolls, teleportation stones), dust (experience points, once you bank enough you can cash it in for +3 strength/vitality/empathy), crystals/doritos/etc (permanent progression stuff to use between-runs). Chests also drop Relics, which are your beefy-yet-ephemeral per-run modifiers that do stuff like add +200% damage to elites, or +5% damage for each player nearby, or give you bonus health based on how much strength you have.

I’ve personally been focusing on raw DPS with the daggers, so I have perks that buff my starting damage, increase relic rarity, and immediately shift to 100% crit chance once I hit a 22 co-strike streak. I’ve upgraded my daggers a few times, and typically chase relics that boost damage either outright or while people are near me. This has been pretty successful… but only because I’ve got the upgrades, which leads me to the problems with the game right now:

  1. As stated previously, they really need to beef up the tutorialization about how essential it is to group up with people. There is ZERO downside to being in groups, there are ONLY upsides.
  2. They need to do something to speed up the power-scaling curve. A fresh save-game is rough. You do barely any damage, you don’t know enemy patterns, you don’t have a good feel for your attack range, and it is very easy to get absolutely ROCKED by the tiniest baby mobs. Getting out of this hole takes awhile, and can feel a bit grindy. It doesn’t really feel bad, right now it just feels like you have to tell prospective players “keep playing til you hit rank 7 then the game really opens up!” and that sucks.
  3. They need to do something to streamline hopeless situations. During an Ascension Battle the game opens up four different extraction zones. Most people go to the north one, do the fight and extract. But there’s always some dude who got stuck clear across the map trying to solo the west zone or something. He’s going to die. You can’t start the boss fight until he wins or dies, and you’re stuck spectating until one of those happens. So you get to watch him dodge roll for 5 minutes until the zone finally times out and consumes him, BUT WAIT! then his stray soul might get consumed by a mob he failed to kill. Then you have to wait for that to time out and have him fully die. It can legitimately be like a 5 minute wait for this hopeless situation to resolve.
  4. Parties still need some work. Right now they’re capped at 4. That seems a little low for a game with 33 players at a time. This game seems designed for big parties, let me roll in with as many players as I can round up, don’t cap me at 4.
  5. UI still needs work. Duh, it’s an early access game, there are going to be bugs, it isn’t a big deal, but it’s definitely still rough right now. There are a couple menus that don’t scroll fast enough, a couple menus with weird controller navigation, marking yourself as ready in a party is a bit weird, etc.

For like runs 1-5 I felt like the game had good bones, but needed a lot of work before release. Since then, every run has felt significantly better than the last, to the point that I don’t think it really needs that much to be a very good game. With some improved tutorialization and faster scaling this game could be amazing. For the moment I recommend it, especially if you have Game Pass because the Game Preview is included. For the final release, to be determined but I feel pretty optimistic.