This is a Thunder Lotus appreciation post. When 33 Immortals was announced in 2023, I got the sense that many people, especially those familiar with the studio only through Spiritfarer, were puzzled to see such a dramatic shift in style and genre. Going from a cozy side-scrolling character-driven farming sim to a top-down online multiplayer with combat and weapon classes is a conspicuous departure. I understand and acknowledge this, but I was not at all surprised by the reveal. I had watched this team make games for eight years and astutely picked up on the one immutable rule for their releases: Thunder Lotus never makes the same game twice.
Their inaugural work, Jotun, is nothing short of a masterpiece of beauty and storytelling. A Viking warrior who dies an inglorious death at sea must engage in combat with giants in the afterlife to earn her place in Valhalla. The studio’s follow-up game, Sundered, is a dark 2D Lovecraftian backtracking platformer of changing passageways and relentless hoards of monsters. In a way, Spiritfarer is the biggest oddity of the catalogue, being the only entry to dispense with combat entirely and offer a light, if sorrowful, tone. 33 Immortals, one could say, is a return to form: if the game harkens to any other, it’s Jotun, the game that started it all, with its deliberate and strategic top-down combat and its crusade to change the protagonist’s lot in the world beyond.
Situated within the landscape of, and drawing heavily from, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, 33 Immortals is a continual journey of celestial rebellion. The player, a soul condemned to eternal damnation, joins an insurgence led by the passionate and formidable Beatrice to defy the fate ordained by God and battle through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso to find a place among the stars.
The art style is arresting, employing the studio’s signature hand-drawn animation. Loading screen splashes, cosmetic backdrops, and environments are highly detailed and moody, evoking antiquity, with depictions that are representational but otherworldly, with space left for interpretation and mystery. Scale plays a role in setting the scene for key moments, and there is also an eldritch touch to the enemies and bosses, which is another quality emblematic of Thunder Lotus design.
Max LL, the composer for Spiritfarer as well as the rest of the studio’s catalog, returns on the soundtrack for 33 Immortals. He is, to put it bluntly, a genius. The orchestral and peaceful tones, the dramatic and the meditative moments, and every piece combined with the animation are integrative and captivating.
On Steam, 33 Immortals describes itself as a roguelike, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Despite some randomized elements and no mid-zone checkpoints, the game has permanent progress between regions: once you advance through one area, you are sent back to the hub, and there is no requirement to do a completed area again (although you can and may wish to in order to pursue some in-game feats and upgrades). I would say the structure of the game is better described as a series of three MMO raids, where completing one unlocks access to the next. I did hear chatter in the Thunder Lotus Discord server indicating that the game had more punishing progression earlier in development, but I’m happy about where it landed: there are incentives—lots of unlockables—to encourage replay such that the design function of losing progress is entirely commuted.
The game offers eight very different weapon choices ranging from intuitive to Byzantine, each with different reaches, strengths, and effects and each requiring practice to master. They feel good when they connect and are satisfying to learn. All weapons are also equipped with a powerful offensive or defensive co-op ability that charges up with successful attacks, and this is one of many facets of the gameplay that drive players to work with one another: co-op powers cannot be activated without the help of allies.
So, pick a weapon and jump online. You can join solo or make a party of up to four with friends. The online matchmaking will fill the lobby with up to 33 players regardless—in the Inferno region anyway. Purgatorio seats just 22 players, and Paradiso takes only 11, each subsequent raid being all the more difficult for the increasing reliance on cooperation from strangers. Rather than voice chat, the game provides a wheel of emotes, with a slow drip of equipable cosmetic unlocks, for communication. Each area contains roaming combatants and upgrades, and each run is divided into phases with chambers that have unique objectives, culminating in a battle that determines whether or not you will ascend.
After one hour of play, on my second or third attempt, I beat Inferno. I was joined on the attempt by a full crew of North American players with a wide range of skill levels for the final boss. With a united fervor, we collectively navigated the riddles of each spell cast, the push and pull of the phases, and the rhythms of attack and defense. We experienced the communal climax of a shared objective handily procured.
After seven hours of play, I beat Purgatorio. The boss patterns were more arcane and teammates less plentiful (rarely do all 22 players survive to fight the boss), but with careful study and execution, here victory was likewise attained.
After 35 hours of play, I realized that, unfortunately, there was no way I was going to beat Paradiso, not with my casual solo approach. I could level up and level up and strategize all I wanted, but I could not overcome one inconvenient reality: the final boss requires all players to have substantial knowledge, near-flawless execution, and a high level of coordination to persevere, and the element of chance is too high with online matchmaking. More than half of my attempts ended with me fighting and dying alone. And so it was that with my eyes set fast on vanquishing this final obstacle, I turned to private matches.
It is humbling to discover that no matter how much you love a game, there are others that will put you to shame. The LFG channel on the Thunder Lotus Discord server is thronging with players that live and breathe 33 Immortals: players that know every exploit and synergy, players that have their routes fastidiously mapped for each possible layout, and players with hundreds of hours under their belts, having been grinding since the first days of early access. As of the latest update, players can create private matches with friends, and, helpfully, the difficulty will scale depending on the size of the group. Theoretically you could do a private run all by yourself (I even met someone on Discord who had done just that), but as the game is designed around cooperation, this method is not ideal.
So I found myself a group of diehards and fellow tryhards and queued up to join a Paradiso run. We communicated using a voice channel. Being unfamiliar with the later phases of the final fight, I reached the end with only 3 HP remaining, but I did reach the end. I went again and fared better: the crew absolutely melted the boss. When I came back a third time, on another day, with the upgrades necessary to see the final cutscene, my controller glitched out for two minutes during the final phase, and I had to turn my Bluetooth off and on again; yet still, I came out the victor. What I’m saying is, if you want to reach the end of the game, such as it is, there are groups of players on the Discord that can and will help you get there.
I understand that in principle it’s a little antithetical to ask the developers to nerf God, but… please, for the love of Beatrice, nerf God. Or at least lay out a surer path to success for players using random matchmaking. Despite the occasional small bug or undercooked mechanic, this is my one and only real critique of the game: I believe you should be able to finish it without relying entirely on the statistical aptitude of strangers. One doesn’t necessarily need to do what I did—you could probably beat the game through a private match with a few committed friends or keep rolling the dice and get lucky with a great team, but the avenue is narrow.
What started as an enthusiastic curiosity about 33 Immortals transformed into something close to an obsession. I believed I was getting an appetizer for At Fate’s End, another Thunder Lotus game set to release this year (my cup runneth over), but instead, I received something absorbing and substantial. Now 60 hours deep and still bullying friends into playing with me on free evenings, this title is something more than ordinary. It is hard for me to separate my love of this game from my love of the studio. Thunder Lotus could have made Spiritfarer 2 and collected an assured windfall, but, as always, they elected to be courageously creative instead.
