Out today, Die or Dive is a promising roguelite scuba sim that basically turns Darkest Dungeon into Ecco the Dolphin

A day will dawn when the premise “what if Darkest Dungeon but also XYZ” will lose its crablike stranglehold on my fancy, but that day is not this day. Today we Dive or Die.

This 2D roguelite scuba sim from Drop Rate Studio and publishers Dear Villagers drops you into a world drowned by “black rain” that inflicts mutations and nightmares. Five years of that downpour have left humanity scraping by on mountaintop islands, so off you go into the “abyssal pool” to dredge up canned food and building materials.

Why This Matters

If you’ve ever wished Darkest Dungeon traded gothic corridors for flooded catacombs and sanity bars for oxygen tanks, this is your game. Individual divers are fragile and disposable—they level up fast, but they also sprout foibles and afflictions as their sanity shrinks. Sound familiar?

The hook is the looming Rainmaker, a sky-scraping squidgod that serves as the source of the black rain. Each run gives you a countdown until it unleashes the final tsunami. To delay it, you must gather relics from the ruins below.

“You’ll fumble down old elevator shafts and delve into labyrinths of tombstones, all the while avoiding and, if you must, battling creatures that consist mostly of elbows and incisors.”

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That’s the core loop: serene exploration at 20 or 30 metres down, interrupted by carnivorous algae and cave-dwelling horrors. The demo I played spans the first 10 in-game days, and I unlocked a dartgun—but I’m in no mood to pick fights. The real tension is deciding when to poke your head into a cave for a crafting blueprint versus when to retreat.

How We Got Here

Roguelite survival games are a crowded pool, but Dive or Die differentiates itself with its underwater setting and a base-building layer. When not paddling through flooded catacombs, you station divers in base buildings for resourcing benefits. It’s a small twist on the Darkest Dungeon hub management formula, but it gives each death a sting—you lose that leveled-up diver, and the base loses its specialist.

The full game is out today on Steam. If you’re curious, the demo is still available for a short while, and it gives a solid taste of that first 10-day scramble.

What’s Next

I’m holding out hope that Dive or Die eventually goes full Barotrauma and hands me an actual submarine. For now, I’ll settle for a dartgun and a healthy fear of elbowy monsters. The countdown to the Rainmaker is ticking, and I’ve got relics to find.