33 Immortals Open Beta: Great Premise, Lackluster Execution

33 Immortals Is a 33 Player Roguelike About Breaking Out of Hell

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33 little guys enter the Inferno (of Dante’s variety), an underworld composed of fire, brimstone, and pissed-off skeletons. This ragtag group isn’t entirely in sync, but they share a common goal as they fight with hefty greatswords, swift daggers, bows, and wands, battling monsters in rebellion against heaven and hell. Some die and return to purgatory while others fight on, their numbers whittled down before they face off against the celestial being that stands between them and their goal: true immortality. This is 33 Immortals, a roguelike from Thunder Lotus (Spiritfarer, Sundered) currently in Open Beta for Xbox and PC, a dry-run for its upcoming Early Access launch. And as you can probably intuit from the intro, the game comes with a big twist on an increasingly familiar run-based format: it features 33-player co-op. It’s an interesting premise that works fairly seamlessly (at least in terms of online connectivity) as a platoon of human-controlled warriors fight toward a common goal.

Specifically, you are doomed souls working together to free yourselves from eternal damnation, rising against God so you can escape the Bad Place and establish a new order. As you and your allies get pulverized into disembodied spirits over and over, you’ll receive aid from various characters from The Divine Comedy, including Beatrice, Virgil, and everyone’s favorite self-inserting author (although this version of the poet refrains from bashing his political enemies at every turn). Back in the hub area, you can unlock perks, try on new cosmetics, and upgrade weapons before partying up with friends or joining up with strangers.

33 Immortals Open beta Preview

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But as you can expect, killing God isn’t exactly easy, even with these upgrades and a boatload of allies. To do so, you’ll have to pass through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each guarded by a near-unkillable boss that will send you back to the beginning upon death. Oh, and on top of defeating these all-powerful beings, to claim ultimate salvation and presumably “win,” you’ll also have to clear a long checklist of objectives called Feats, like “Kill 75 Monsters with the Sword of Justice”—after all, there’s nothing more hellish than busywork.

This cycle of slowly building up your character over the course of runs while getting routinely crushed along the way is nothing new for roguelikes, but it’s worth dwelling a bit more on the whole 33-player thing. Drawing off MMO raids, you’re heavily incentivized to coordinate with other players to survive. Specifically, as you slay monsters scattered across an open area, your group will gradually unlock six-player mini-dungeons called Torture Chambers, which reward loot when conquered; when these open up, players start scrambling towards them like a more violent game of musical chairs. Essentially, the name of the game is to beef up your warrior as much as possible with ability-modifying relics and stat upgrades before your 33-person crew has slain enough creatures to trigger an Ascension Battle, which lets you challenge the boss of the area.

Hopefully, enough of you are left alive by the time you face off against these ultimate big bads because they are tough and entirely impossible to defeat alone. The first is Lucifer, a hulking three-headed monster who sweeps you with skeletal arms and spews unblockable hellfire if your teammates don’t coordinate properly. It all leads to fights that feel suitably large-scale as you form temporary alliances with others before the survivors band together for a climactic final battle.

But while 33 Immortals delivers on the promise of these large-scale battles through intuitive matchmaking and seamless connectivity (at least from what I’ve seen), it comes up short when it comes to the particulars of these large-scale brawls: unfortunately, it just isn’t very fun as an action game. While on the surface, it is tempting to compare this experience to Hades, another isometric roguelike where you dash around an underworld wielding weapons like a magic bow and cartoonishly large sword, these superficial similarities simply draw more attention to how Thunder Lotus’ latest comes up short.

While Hades’ Zagreus crackles through Tartarus like Greek lightning, 33 Immortals’ protagonist has an Achilles heel: they have to wait a whopping four seconds for their dash to cool down between uses. That may not sound like a lot, but it may as well be an eternity in a high-octane action game. I found myself awkwardly slow-walking in and out of fights while waiting for this ability to recharge, and while several of the weapons have ways to mitigate this shortcoming—like how the great sword can perform a parry, of course—these skills are also tied to cooldowns and resources. Most games in this style have you weaving through storms of bullets and blades, but this one is downright sluggish by comparison, almost entirely because it’s so damn stingy about its dash cooldown. But even if you could dodge to your heart’s content, it doesn’t fix the damage-sponging enemies or how the weapon toolsets are so barebones, consisting of only two basic attacks that don’t receive significant modifications from the loot you come across.

Admittedly, I imagine most of this, from the slow dash cooldown to the number of hits it takes to kill bad guys, was designed considering that you’ll usually have 32 teammates hacking and slashing alongside you. If everyone was as strong as Zagreus, the map might be filled with too much visual noise as a dozen dudes somersault around and rip their foes to shreds. It’s clear the core design philosophy here is to mix in elements from MMOs, like the emphasis on cooldowns and the need for cooperation in bigger battles, while combining these elements with the streamlined sleekness of an action game; here, there’s no life-consuming grinding or monthly subscriptions.

That said, the current iteration of this vision falls awkwardly between these two inspirations, falling to synthesize both halves because it’s a mushy action game that lacks the means to meaningfully coordinate these battles, making it frequently feel like your fate rests mostly in the hands of the matchmaking gods. This feeling of powerlessness that comes from being only one of many players is best summarized by one of the first boss’ most deadly attacks, “Eternal Sorrow,” an unblockable rain of hellfire that melts health bars if you don’t deactivate it by smashing a bunch of crystals shattered throughout the map—it doesn’t matter how individually skilled you are if too many of your teammates have died along the way or can’t output enough damage quickly enough.

While 33 Immortals occasionally lives up to its potential as an action/MMO hybrid when your co-conspirators combine powers and utilize their team-up abilities to challenge the divine, right now, it lacks the snappy gameplay of other roguelikes and the depth of online RPGs. And perhaps most surprisingly, considering this is the same outfit that brought to life Spiritfarer’s gorgeous ukiyo-e inspired art, the studio’s latest fails to conjure anything particularly gnarly or memorable, delivering flat character designs and generic foes.

As always, these criticisms come with the significant caveat that this is a beta for a game launching in Early Access, and many of these problems could be fixed by the 1.0 release. For instance, they could very likely address the issue around the slow dashes—there’s already an in-game power-up that temporarily lessens these cooldowns, so this change doesn’t feel unlikely. But even with its upsides, 33 Immortals took its hellish backdrop too seriously: at the moment, it’s a bit torturous to play.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.

33 Immortals Is a 33 Player Roguelike About Breaking Out of Hell