Doom Meets BioShock and Overwatch in the Coolest New Shooter in Years

Deepward Could Be the Hellish FPS Doom Fans Are Craving

On July 7, Doom: The Dark Ages received a sizable expansion, Revelations, which players and critics alike praised. Just one day earlier, however, Microsoft announced a round of layoffs that eliminated nearly half of id Software’s staff. A few days later the studio posted an update promising fans it still has “the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for.” Even so, it’s natural for fans to feel uneasy about where the series goes from here.

For Doom devotees searching for something to look forward to, Deepward deserves a place on your radar. It’s a breakneck first-person shooter with roguelite mechanics, in which every wound and every death carries weight, because a fatal mistake here is exactly that: fatal.

Deepward Channels the Same Infernal Atmosphere as Doom

The announcement trailer for Deepward offers a tantalizing taste of what lies ahead. Dual-wielding heroes kick doors off their hinges, shoot and carve a path through advancing hordes of the undead, and even scatter a few candles to smudge the edges of a pentagram daubed across the floor in red paint. Is that paint, or blood? Given the setting and the game’s ambitions, we’re betting on blood.

Your journey takes you through the Depths, a nightmarish realm that fuses the creepiest mansion you can imagine with a sprawling subterranean labyrinth, complete with torture chambers and rivers of acid. You’ll rotate between six characters, each with their own weapons, abilities, and health bars, as you fight roaring abominations that seem to have taken a wrong turn on the way to Doom.

Deepward also borrows a page from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem with its own sanity system. As the party of seasoned mercenaries presses deeper into the cursed estate hidden in the Carpathian forests, they contend with more than monsters: hallucinations, warped visuals, unearthly whispers, and a mounting dread that pulses in time with the thundering soundtrack. The line between reality and madness dissolves. Lesser heroes might have turned back for easier work, like fighting terrorists or storming the front lines of a world war. But there’s no retreating now. You’re in far too deep.

Sounds Great, But When Can We Play It?

The frustrating part is that nobody knows exactly when we’ll get to sink real hours into Deepward‘s blood-soaked corridors. A Steam release is planned for sometime in 2027, but that’s a wide window. In the meantime, there is a demo available at the time of writing.

Echofall Games, the studio behind Deepward, counts key developers from Madfinger Games and HGames-ArtWorks among its ranks. The game clearly embraces the dark subject matter and relentless pace that made the best Doom titles so satisfying. Whenever it finally arrives in full, we’ll be waiting.