This massively multiplayer roguelike with Hades combat won my heart, and it's fixing my biggest worry by coming to Steam

After a year of Early Access exclusivity on the Epic Games Store and Xbox/PC Game Pass, 33 Immortals is set to land on Steam this summer. Its wider release appears to be far from the end of the road for the massively multiplayer roguelike raid simulator, too, with another content-heavy update set for the same time. But is it too little too late for the game that blends the action of Hades with the boss battles of a modern MMO? That depends.

From Thunder Lotus Games, the fine folks behind Sundered, Jotun, and Spiritfarer, 33 Immortals launched to a solid response in March 2025. I myself gave it high praise, heralding it as “a quick-fire MMO that scratches the raid itch I haven’t had the time to soothe in years.” I even went so far as to peer into the future, saying that “Should I ever try 33 Immortals on Steam Deck, it could very well consume me.” Well, the time has almost come for me to eat my words. And eat them I certainly shall.

When the gates of hell first opened, 33 Immortals had enough content to comfortably command a few dozen hours of the average newcomer: weapons to hone, feats to unlock, upgrades to work toward, and a couple of powerful bosses that required a large group of decently well-equipped wandering souls to conquer. As time went on, though, a problem arose – proof that a few experienced players could trivialize encounters for newcomers, through no fault of their own, simply by wanting to play the first map again.

In 33 Immortals, players phase into a run by walking through the gates of a shared hub world. Once a lobby hits that magic 33 number, anyone else begins to funnel into another. Find yourself in a lobby with experienced players, and they’ll be doing far more damage than those just getting started, turning a boss that can take a fresh group multiple runs to fell, into an accidental speedrun. It’s the sort of situation that threatens to rob less-experienced players of the feeling of hard-fought success that fuels the addicting MMO raid grind.

Will the wider launch of 33 Immortals do anything to alleviate that? On a gameplay balance level, I don’t know. But the more maps available for players to progress through, the lower the chances are of a band of powerful god killers wandering into a map they can overpower like a biblical tidal wave.

But the biggest problem for any game priding itself on a specific number of players is when it struggles to attract them. Now, I haven’t logged in to check on the population for a good long while. And though I initially worried the EGS exclusivity would be a swift nail in the coffin for this type of idea, it being included in Game Pass on PC and consoles had me confident that the playerbase would be strong enough at launch that tens of thousands would get to experience what I did in our carefully-curated pre-launch play sessions.

Today, I’m relieved. Relieved and confident that 33 Immortals could be on track for the recognition it deserves. With growing comparisons to 2024’s Ravenswatch, which got another character drop just yesterday, I’m sure that if 33 Immortals manages to strike the right chord on Steam, the influx of new players will make it far easier to band with other newbies trying their darndest to burst down waves of enemies before Lucifer rains hell upon them. And it should snowball from there.

Even before then, the recently revealed roadmap for 2026 has outlined what’s coming before the big day. Though the previously announced Charity weapon has been pushed back for the 1.0 release, the Gluttony weapon is due this Winter, while Paradiso – the long-awaited third map – has been brought forward into sometime in Spring. That means existing players will have a new zone and main monster to master before the floodgates of hell open for the wider Steam release, which, putting the pieces together, seems set to mark the end of 33 Immortals’ Early Access adventure. “Servers, bug fixes, and patches” beyond 1.0 have been promised, but the nature of those updates is something we’ll have to wait a little longer to hear about.

Want to see why this was one of my favorite games of 2024? You can grab 33 Immortals for $19.99 / £15.99. That’s through the Epic Games Store, but with crossplay already supported between platforms, you’ll be ready to jump in with Steam players once they join the fray this Summer. Just try not to ruin the early spark with your maxed out Glaive of Temperance, yeah? We literally just spoke about this.