DIVE or DIE - Children of Rain

I kept telling myself one more dive. Just one. Then the oxygen gauge ticked low, something enormous moved through the dark water ahead of me, and my diver was gone, permanently, taking all the loot we needed to upgrade the camp workshop. That loop, equal parts meditative and merciless, is what Drop Rate Studio has quietly built here, and it is one of the most confident small-team releases I have encountered this year. The structure splits cleanly in two. On the surface, you manage a floating camp of survivors against a 40-day countdown: assign people to roles, build and upgrade gear in the workshop, recruit new divers from the wreckage, and occasionally decide who to sacrifice to keep the rest alive. It carries the weight and moral unease of games like This War of Mine or Darkest Dungeon, where every roster decision has a cost. Below the waterline is where the game finds its voice entirely. The Abyssal Pool is a procedurally rearranged labyrinth of drowned ruins, and your oxygen meter is the true enemy, not the eldritch creatures drifting through the dark. Every additional room explored is weighed against the breath remaining to surface, so the push-your-luck tension is baked into the physics rather than bolted on as a difficulty modifier. Sanity runs alongside oxygen as a second pressure, and the deeper you go, the harder both meters bite. Death is permanent. Knowledge is the only thing you carry forward. The atmosphere is where this team of three earns real admiration. Each underwater biome is visually distinct, with its own creature types, ruins, and environmental storytelling that pieces together what the Black Rain actually did to the world. Combat leans on evasion over aggression, which is the right call tonally. You are not a hero clearing a dungeon; you are a person who should not be down here. The Metroidvania-style map progression rewards careful divers who study the layout, and multiple endings give later runs genuine direction. Normal, Hard, and Endless modes let you calibrate the punishment to taste, and there is apparently an optional timer disable for players who find the 40-day clock too brutal. The flaws are real, though, and worth naming honestly. Combat is thin in a way that becomes noticeable once you have learned the creatures' tells. Enemy variety thins out before the biome count does, so repeat runs start echoing themselves sooner than they should. And some reviewers have noted that late-game difficulty flattens once gear outpaces threats, turning tense dives into mechanical farming. A handful of players also flagged crashes that swallowed hard-earned loot, which is the kind of bug that turns a good session sour fast. These are the marks of a small studio stretching toward something ambitious, and they land lighter than you might expect given how complete the core loop feels. If you lived on Darkest Dungeon and have been waiting for something that channels that same dread without copying it wholesale, this is worth serious attention. If you bounce off punishing resource games or need combat that rewards aggression, it will frustrate more than reward. But for anyone who finds the ocean genuinely unsettling at depth, there is something rare here: a game that understands why.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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