33 Immortals players surprised me with patience and helpfulness
33 Immortals is a rogue-lite about escaping purgatory with 32 other players. When I jumped in alone, I was surprised to encounter patience and friendliness.
33 Immortals, from Thunder Lotus Games (Spiritfarer), has been out for a week in Early Access, and I am having a great time with it. The core concept of the game is great: a rogue-lite action RPG where 33 players must work together to try to escape purgatory. You can team up with a few friends, but I have been jumping in solo, and it’s providing me with the kind of anonymous multiplayer experience that I didn’t know I missed so much.
33 Immortals is the perfect multiplayer experience I forgot I enjoyed
This is a challenging game. Even with 32 other players on your team, the game is going to throw screen-fulls of enemies, periodic events where fireballs are thrown at you, and several environments each with their own bosses. 33 Immortals has four weapon types: The Bow of Hope, the Sword of Justice, the Daggers of Greed, and the Staff of Sloth. I love using the staff because it lets me keep a medium distance from enemies and slow down targets for my allies to pick apart with swords and daggers. Having a variety of weapons within a group feels great because they all provide different benefits and attacking styles.
What really captured me about this game though, was the silent, anonymous multiplayer. It’s been a very long time since I’ve jumped into a primarily multiplayer game on my own. I’ve basically moved on from most PvP games at this point in my life, but PvE always sounds great. 33 Immortals sounded unique, and during my first time playing, I was hooked. During a run, players can gather upgrades that help keep them alive or deal more damage. A few of these can be found scattered around the map, but most of them come from Torture Chambers, which only open at certain times and only allow a certain number of players to enter.
When several Torture Chambers open, the group of 33 spreads in various directions. By this point, the players have been spreading out, fighting monsters, and finding other types of loot, meaning you will have already found a handful of players to stick with. With no voice chat or text chat, I started noticing the video game body language of the other players. They would patiently wait while I opened a chest or do a dash back and forth to try to tell me “We’re going this way!” Online video games have caused me to become so jaded over the last few years that the idea of other players being friendly and even patient was shocking to me.
This reminded me of years ago when I would jump into random MMOs for a month or two and random strangers would be friendly and helpful. These days, it’s hard to play a round of Overwatch without someone telling you to swap characters.
33 Immortals is currently available on Xbox Game Pass, both consoles and on PC, and is on the Epic Games store. There are currently no plans for a Steam launch or other platforms, which is a shame because the more people who can play this the better. It is still in Early Access, so perhaps in a year or so it will hit 1.0 and maybe that’s when it will make an appearance on other platforms. I just have to say it: this feels like it would be a great Switch 2 game. I hope so, because I think the world could use a reminder of how friendly video game strangers can be.
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