When you think of the biblical figures Adam and Eve, the image that comes to mind is usually the one created by Italian Renaissance artists like Michelangelo centuries ago. Gaze up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and their soft, pudgy, and unclothed bodies reveal they’ve yet to experience the hardship of a single day’s work in the blissful Garden of Eden.

In the upcoming multiplayer roguelike 33 Immortals, Adam and Eve look very different from the wayward children of Michelangelo's imagination. When players encounter them at the end of Purgatorio, the second region in Thunder Lotus Games’ take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Adam and Eve are lithe and powerful figures. They soar with balletic grace across the Garden of Eden—not naked or clothed in humble fig leaves, but adorned in glorious golden armor.

Cem Ertekin, Game Designer at Thunder Lotus Games, informed us that the first humans won’t send you to meet your maker in 33 Immortals. Instead they threaten something worse, striving to prevent your own showdown with the Heavenly Father by blocking your raiding party’s path to Paradiso.

As your group—33 rebellious souls in Inferno cut down to 22 in Purgatorio—ascends closer to Paradiso, the beings you encounter are increasingly strange and abstract, transcending the confines of mortality. “The vibe we want is the idea of unsettling perfection, a thing that is so beyond human comprehension that it has an understanding of what perfection is,” explained Ertekin.

Purgatorio is the realm of purification, roamed by penitent sinners like Guaritore (formerly nicknamed Benny the Monk) who seek to strip away their worldly corruption. Adam and Eve, trapped at the furthest edge of a paradise they can never reach, represent the apex of a departure from the knowable into a place of abstract, almost alien-like horrors.

Famously, Adam and Eve are far from perfect, thanks to a fateful bite of a forbidden apple—otherwise they simply wouldn’t be in Purgatorio. That much is clear from their sinister entrance, descending in a beam of light as one being in the pristine idyll of the Garden of Eden, before tearing apart into two beings with an anguished wail that irreparably devastates their lush surroundings.

Their attacks mirror their corruption. Like Miyamoto, Ertekin was inspired by gardening, but it took him in a very different direction from Pikmin’s cute, homely gardens and inviting exploration. Flowers, leaves, and petals, usually seen as objects of natural beauty, become tools of torment for the players who dare interrupt Adam and Eve’s sorrow. Captain Olimar wouldn’t stand a chance.

As 33 Immortals' greatest threat so far reveals itself, Ertekin wants players to feel painfully unwelcome. “The Garden of Eden belongs to Adam and Eve and you do not belong here. You must leave,” he said.

The first sinners

Lucifer, boss of the first region Inferno, is encased from the torso downwards in a lake of ice. He’s a terrifying but stationary figure, as we previously discovered in our last chat with Ertekin.

Adam and Eve present a sterner challenge, combining rapid mobility and an aerial threat. When designing Adam and Eve, Thunder Lotus wanted to stretch player’s teamwork and on-the-fly strategic skills by introducing unexpected mechanics via sub-objectives triggered throughout the fight.

Adam’s Forgotten Sins conjures three sigils which players must locate, destroying the trees bearing the corresponding icons in sequence, like mystical safecrackers. With Remembered Virtues, Eve (ever the hungry one) summons figs towards her position. If they reach her, subsequent attacks become impossible to avoid, so the roguelike momentarily becomes a tower defense game, as players coordinate to intercept before Eve can pluck the figs from the ground. Another late-stage attack drenches the arena in poison, asking players to vanquish elite enemies while weaving a safe path through rivers of blistering bile.

There’s a lot going on: more information to parse, more strategy to deploy, demanding smarter division of labor and wise positioning to dodge constantly shifting damage zones. All this, performed under the constraint that players coordinate their efforts with no voice chat, simply using emotes and (a gesture that paints a thousand words) their actions. As a live service game, Ertekin said the team’s always refining 33 Immortals' balance to find that rewarding balance where obstacles remain intimidating but also feel just about achievable.

Considering the infernal schemes they hurl at players, Thunder Lotus found that legibility can be a limiting factor just as important as players’ raw damage output. “We do escalation by throwing more things at the player,” Ertekin explained. “But there is such a thing as throwing too many things at the player. At the end of the day, what matters more is not just throwing the whole kitchen sink at the player, but making sure that the challenge that we're providing makes sense—not just in terms of being doable, but in terms of understanding just exactly what's going on.”

Marvels of cooperation

As two beings formed from one body (Eve made from a rib plucked from Adam by his creator), you can rightly expect a high degree of coordination. Conceptualizing—and then delivering on—that sense of unison in a boss battle proved to be a rewarding design challenge for the team. Thunder Lotus produced logic chains for each member of the duo that complemented each other’s actions, intelligently supporting instead of undercutting. When one charges up a show-stopping move that deals out major damage, the other keeps players on their toes with their normal attacks, summoning spikes, shooting razor-sharp leaves, and adding more surprises deeper into the battle.

“As you will see in their introductory cutscene and in the technical code of the game, they are two entities,” explained Ertekin. “They are two bodies, but one heart or one brain if you will. Whatever you do to one, the other one feels and shares. This applies to debuffs, this applies to their health pool, and this applies to their decision making.”

Teamwork—and judicious choices in relic and build selection—is the only way to take down Adam and Eve. And that teamwork, togetherness, and ingenuity that Thunder Lotus hope to inspire in their players is the very same skill that gave birth to their impressive creation in 33 Immortals. “Working with our team of programmers, artists or animators, it's truly a group effort. It's a marvel of cooperation making video games. And this boss fight is no exception!” Ertekin said.

Sign up for the latest 33 Immortals updates at 33immortals.com ahead of its Early Access launch on the Epic Games Store.