- Verdict
- A demanding niche challenge series
- Released
- 1 Oct 2026
- Platforms
- PC
- Streamer fit
- Challenge runners, Discovery-focused, Story-first
- Genres
- Role-playing (RPG), Adventure
Combat is demanding, but skill choices, crafting, routes, and death rules create discussion between fights.
Boss attempts, rare drops, hardcore losses, and unusual skill combinations can produce clear peaks.
Twelve zones, bosses, hundreds of skills, gathering, crafting, and several death modes create a long runway.
Souls-like action is crowded, and a dense independent RPG must explain its difference quickly.
Takeaway
The Depths of Despair earns a 6/10 provisional Chum score. Its large skill system, bosses, gathering, and selectable death consequences can support a serious challenge series, but dense presentation, a crowded category, and almost no reception evidence make it a specialist choice.
What is The Depths of Despair?
The Depths of Despair is a single-player dark-fantasy action RPG that combines slower souls-like combat with the skill bars, gathering, and open-ended progression associated with an MMO. The player controls a man close to becoming a demon who searches for his daughter while helping an angel find her missing sister.
Combat sits beside several progression trades. Mining provides ore for smithing, rare gems support enchantments, and monsters and herbs become meals that can grant temporary or permanent benefits. Equipment upgrades have no stated level cap, while roughly 300 skills and perks can be mixed across trees.
The world contains twelve zones, twelve bosses, and 156 monster types. Normal mode returns the character to a hub after death, Softcore drops carried items, and Hardcore deletes the run. A Custom mode acts as a built-in randomiser, letting a creator change the rules after the main journey stops being new.
How the game has been received
Broad reception cannot yet be assessed. Steam showed two positive recommendations on 8 October, which is not a meaningful player sample, and there was no critic aggregate or pair of substantial independent reviews. The Chum score is provisional and does not treat the store's large feature count as proof that the systems cohere in practice. Current Steam listing.
The Chum score measures streamability. It does not rate conventional game quality. Independently sourced reception is one factor in the broadcast verdict.
The streamer verdict
A systems-heavy creator has plenty to narrate: which tree supports the current weapon, whether an ore run is worth delaying the boss, and what a harsher death mode changes. Boss health and lost items provide stakes that a new viewer can recognise even before understanding the ability bar.
The burden is explanation. Hundreds of skills and uncapped upgrades can make progress look like menus and repeated gathering unless the host states a specific build target. The souls-like category also gives viewers many established alternatives, so a generic first playthrough may struggle to stand out.
Build around one rule
Choose a visible skill identity, name the next boss, and use death mode as the season premise. A Softcore recovery run or Hardcore reset is easy to understand; an unrestricted character changing trees every hour is much harder for returning viewers to remember.
Final verdict
The Depths of Despair earns a 6/10 provisional Chum score for buildcraft and challenge specialists. Its scale suggests a durable series, but dense systems, launch competition, and the absence of meaningful reception evidence make clear self-imposed structure essential.
