Review: Deep Madness:: Hardcore underwater horror survival

by SiarX

At first glance Deep Madness looks like Lovecraftian underwater Zombicide: a lot of monsters, a lot of dice rolling, too. However here you cannot just smash hordes of zombies, you have to survive and run away. Coupled with grim artstyle, creepy monsters and plot it creates a great horror atmosphere.

While combat is dice rolling, you can mitigate random by spending sanity tokens. However this will eventually lead to getting madness tokens, and if you grow too mad, there will be nasty consequences... A nice dilemma.

Oxygen is another cool and thematic mechanics. If you spend all oxygen while in water, you have to get to surface or start slowly dying...

All things above together with game becoming harder over time (monsters grow in numbers, rooms get devoured - become monster spawns or do bad things to you, madness increases) turns Deep Madness into more a efficiency puzzle rather than standard dungeon crawler.

Unfortunately game is very fiddly. So many tokens and little things to manage...

Also game is brutal. Winning is extremely hard. You will keep losing and losing, most likely. Many people will dislike such difficulty level, and I am not very fond of it. Good for fans of Lovecraft, horrors or hardcore coops.

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