I know plenty of games use the ocean as a source of dread, but very few have made it resonate as much as Dive or Die: Children of Rain, a new horror exploration game from Drop Rate Studio. Not quite a roguelike, the game recalls the vibe and structure of Darkest Dungeon or Aliens: Dark Descent, but instead of exploring cursed dungeons or a Xenomorph-infested planet, your diving into a post-apocalyptic aquatic abyss teeming with eldritch horrors. It’s a challenging and demanding game, but it’s worth the investment for those that like tense exploration and desperate resource management.

The Black Rain came out of nowhere and drowned the world. The oceans rose and buried our world in a watery grave. You play as a band of survivors living in a floating village trying to save what’s left of the world. Old Jack, a member of your group, is haunted by visions and believes you can appease the Maker of Rain, the incomprehensible being that flooded the planet, by diving into the depths and collecting eight lost idols. But time is of the essence, as there’s only 40 days left until the final flood comes to take you.

Each day, you send one of your people down into the depths in search of an idol, but it’s not quite that simple. The dives are presented in 2D, making it feel slightly Metroidvania-y in the way you explore. Your divers each have their own unique set of stats that are upgraded over time that will help them on their dive. Oxygen capacity, carry weight, hit points, and sanity all are important to monitor as you plunge the depths and face the horrors beneath. At the beginning, when your characters’ air capacity is still low, these dives can be pretty brief, lasting only a couple of minutes, but still full of important decisions about what types of resources you should collect on your specific run.

It should be noted that while the resources and enemies change a bit from day to day, the map you’re exploring is static, so navigational knowledge can quickly become just as important as any resources you may pick up. These resources will be crucial to your success, as there’s upkeep that needs to be done at your base. The community has a nutrition and morale value, and those both tick down depending on the number of people you have in your base. Picking up food and heirlooms will help increase your stats, while going into a negative value can have disastrous effects for your community. Narrative events will frequently happen at the base, sometimes involving a simple choice to make, and this can give characters different status effects, which greatly affects their efficiency during a dive.

Fortunately, they don’t all have to be good divers. Your base has a variety of buildings that all grant bonuses if you station a member of your team there. For example, having someone manning the lighthouse will allow you to send people on expeditions where they have a certain percent chance to come back with items and survivors, while stationing someone at the Town Hall can increase your upper limit of nutrition and morale. Not only can each building be upgraded as you collect and spend resources, but leveling up a character can give you a chance to pick new abilities that enhance their abilities at a specific location.

Characters will gain experience points both for diving and for manning locations, and leveling up always feels meaningful. Not only are you given an opportunity to increase their stats, but the abilities they gain can help you focus their utility, whether that be for exploration, resource gathering, or a specific function in the town. When getting new characters in your camp, by default you get one per day but others can join from expeditions, they will often come with specific abilities that show you how best to use them. Whenever I got someone with Iron Lungs, a skill that allowed them to dash without any penalty to oxygen consumption, I knew that I would end up focusing all their skills on diving, making a powerful explorer that I used when I had specific, challenging goals in mind.

Another way to help improve your characters is crafting new items at the workshop. You start the game with a rudimentary knife and needle gun, but as you find blueprints and upgrade the structure, you’ll be given options to craft more useful consumables along with permanent upgrades. At the beginning, it was exciting to get things like a brighter lantern or bigger oxygen tank, but by the end I was getting things like supernaturally enhanced storage lockers and a teleport option called the “blood gates.” Occasionally, exploration is gated behind new technology, limiting you on where you can go until you are able to upgrade yourself to a specific level. This not only gives you a satisfying feeling when you finally are able to, for example, pass through toxic areas, but also helps keep you to earlier areas while you’re lower level, without letting you go too far out of your depth, pun intended.

As I mentioned, there’s a 40 day countdown timer that you’re given, but there’s an important structure in your camp that can help you push back the countdown. When manned, the altar allows you to make sacrifices to the Maker of Rain, which fills up a meter that will delay the flood. Sacrificing nutrition or morale will fill the meter 25 percent, which means it will take a while for you to build up to actually earning a day, so the real way to keep your head above water is by sacrificing your characters. These will give you 15 percent per level, so you’re incentivized to kill the best of your roster when times get tough. It’s a brutal choice to have to make, and it really elevates the decision making you’re doing. I would occasionally get a level four character from an expedition and give them abilities that helped them earn XP faster, just fattening them up for the altar with no intention of ever using them as a useful member of my society. It really shows you how the dark, cultish mindset of your society quickly devolves into desperate barbarism, making for a bleak tone that might not be for everyone.

When you plunge into the Abyssal Pool, you’ll find distinct biomes with their own types of creatures that are out to tear you to shreds. Things start out pretty basic, with serene reefs around sunken buildings, but things quickly get horrifying and surreal. Each of the areas has their own visual theming, each gorgeous in their own right, and often have specific creatures that have their own gimmick. Running into these beasts and figuring out how they operate is part of the fun and mystery of the game, so I won’t spoil it here, but they provided some of the best horror moments I’ve had in gaming this year. Thanks to the excellent sound design, you’ll always hear them coming before seeing them, making for truly terrifying moments. I’ll never forget hearing a guttural roar from the deep, dashing my way back to the surface, and seeing a glimpse of something at the edge of my lantern range encroaching on me from the abyss below.

Getting to actually see the creature is just as exciting, because the monsters are rendered in a heavily-lined art style with designs that capture the alien feel of what lurks in the oceans. Classic sea creatures twisted into Lovecraftian forms lurk the Abyssal Pool, and their beautiful, Mike Mignola-like forms will always leave me with a combination of terror and awe. They each have their own unique audio cues, allowing you to prepare for what’s coming, though forewarned rarely means forearmed.

Since you’re going to be frequently passing through the earlier biomes, there’s a clever mechanic incorporated that allows you to escalate the challenge for greater resources. Each zone has a place where you can sacrifice a diver, which makes the monsters in that area more dangerous while also allowing for blessed resources to spawn there. The blessed versions are necessary for higher level crafting and upgrades, so you will need to make the sacrifice at some point, but when you do it is up to you. It’s a smart way for allowing you to opt in to higher level stuff at your own pace, even if you still have the countdown bearing down on you.

Searching for the idols is the main driver of progress, and the way they dole out the objectives is clever and thematic, if occasionally frustrating. You’ll be given instructions on how to find them in the form of visions from Jack, providing vague guidance without giving you concrete direction. It’s a double edge sword, because I do really enjoy the exploration, and the experience of something clicking into place feels so great when you finally figure it out, but there have been times that I’ve wasted so many in-game days following the directions incorrectly in a dangerous zone.

You’ll assemble your in-game map by collecting fragments as you explore, but it can only be viewed at the library between dives. Once you’re being guided to the later areas, it feels really punishing to die quickly in a new, unmapped environment after spending a lot of time struggling to get a high level character down there. The game does provide ways for you to get up or down faster through quick travel as you get upgrades, but it still feels like there were too many times I took a level 7+ character to a lower area only to get eaten by something I didn’t know how to deal with. Much like Darkest Dungeon, it feels extremely punishing to lose someone you spent so much time on. I know this is the intended experience from the developers, but I found it more frustrating than exciting most of the time.

Once you do get your hand on an idol, there is a new ability unlocked associated with it. These can be equipped at the altar, and the number you can equip is based on the structure’s current level. For how central these are to the plot, I was hoping that they would be a little more useful, but I found myself often forgetting they were there. While they definitely helped me out in a pinch more than once, nothing felt like a massive jump in the power curve that I was looking for.

Every day, there’s a chance for the world condition to change, adding some strange modifiers to your dives. Much like the discovery inherent in the exploration, these were fun to figure out as I went. The first time I saw it say “RED MOON” made my skin crawl with the possibilities, as I had no idea how it would affect my dive. Since you’re usually trying to plan a dive around a specific objective, whether it’s resource gathering or exploring or an idol run, these conditions derailed those plans several times, causing me to figure out how to pivot to get something out of a more dangerous day.

As much as I enjoy all the resource and base management involved in the game, the real secret sauce for Dive or Die is how good those dives feel. Even when you have a creature’s gimmick figured out, it’s never in a way that trivializes it, keeping you on the edge of your seat trying to execute perfectly to circumvent it. There’s nothing more thrilling than grabbing that idol with 30 percent oxygen left and making a mad dash to the surface, panicking and making a wrong turn, only to successfully get to an exit with five percent oxygen to spare. While I think having a map that you could view while exploring would be immensely helpful, I usually had a screenshot of it on my second monitor, there’s something about forcing you into a position where you have to intimately know the world yourself is so satisfying.

Pressure mechanics like the incoming flood are extremely risky for games, as that extra layer of challenge can really make your losses free double frustrating. If I take out my level 10 diver to the deepest zone I’ve ever been, only to have them get killed by something I had no idea existed, it feels devastating. Not only do I lose a diver I’ve put a ton of work into, but I also just spent one of my valuable days getting absolutely nothing. This can be compounded if you made mistakes early on without realizing it, making things extremely rough as you’re sacrificing high level divers just to hold back the flood. I saw a post on the Steam forums from the developers saying that there would be an Endless Mode available from day one, but it wasn’t in the review build I played. I hope it exists upon release, because it’s something I would definitely recommend if you find countdowns like that to be too stressful.

About halfway through, I got very frustrated by the timer because one of the upgrades for my workshop was stuck behind an extremely rare resource that I had no idea where to find. Based on the name of the resource, I tried to guess where it was, but could not find it after wasting several days looking for it. I had so many blueprints that told me I needed to upgrade my workshop, and even though I possessed the resources to craft the items, I wasn’t allowed to. Once I found the needed upgrade material, I was actually able to upgrade the workshop twice in a row because I had already collected the other materials needed for the next level in the time it took me to find it. It’s a fine line to walk when you are putting this level of challenge in front of the player and trusting that they’ll be able to find things in the order that you want, and this part crossed that line and massively demoralized me for several hours of playtime, and probably not in the way the developers intended.

Dive or Die: Children of Rain is a punishingly challenging game that finds multiple ways to keep the pressure on you. While most of the time it works to make your successes feel truly thrilling, there are times when your losses take the wind out of your sails in a negative way. Despite my frustrations with later game difficulty, it’s hard to deny that the game captures the combination of wonder and terror of the deep better than almost any other game I’ve played. The environments are horrifically beautiful, populated with the unsettling eldritch monstrosities and plenty of eerie mystery. The experience of desperately ascending to the surface, trying to remember the turns to take as the sound of a massive beast gets louder and louder on your heels is such a unique brand of horror that this game manages to capture. Even when the setbacks were mounting and I was losing hope, I found myself saying “just one more dive” over and over again. The level of difficulty won’t be for everyone, but fans of the desperate feeling of Darkest Dungeon or XCOM will find a lot to love here.

Review code provided by publisher.

Dive or Die: Children of Rain is available now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.