In multiplayer roguelike 33 Immortals, 33 players band together to fight their way through an afterlife inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and eventually challenge God to win their freedom from eternal damnation. Like its source material, 33 Immortals is broken down into three worlds—Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise—each divided into environments inspired by different sections of Alighieri’s seminal work. To escape Dante’s Inferno, though, players will first have to face its most powerful inhabitant: Lucifer.

With 33 Immortals, developer Thunder Lotus Games is looking to capture the feeling of big-team MMO raids but with the ease of dropping into a multiplayer match—a “pick up and raid” approach, as Game Designer Cem Ertekin explained. The toughest challenges of these kinds of raids are their bosses, so the team wanted Lucifer, the first boss of 33 Immortals, to be daunting to face while also making sure the fight would be compelling for everyone in a huge group of 33 players.

“This is our first boss, so we needed to figure out what that meant for our game in terms of the size, the scaling,” Ertekin said. “There were a lot of tests done on what kind of size we wanted to do, what kind of objectives we wanted to have in the fight, finding the balance between having something visually interesting and having something that is not too complex.”

But 33 Immortals isn’t meant to be an easy game, either; like other roguelikes, it’s a game where you should expect to die a lot along the way as you earn upgrades and hone your skills. While you start a run with 32 other players, if they fall in battle, your group will have to make do with the losses.

The driving force in designing the fight with Lucifer, Ertekin said, was making sure that it felt truly epic for players. Lucifer is a massive boss, and that scale is meant to convey the scope of the challenge you’re facing—even with 32 other players at your back. At the same time, this is the first boss fight in the game, and Thunder Lotus needed to make sure it remained accessible and not just something that would be fun for the game’s most hardcore players. 

“For us, Lucifer serves as a benchmark, right?” Ertekin said. “This is the initial experience. And the challenge that we put for ourselves is to be able to have such a good balance of that difficulty, to make sure that Lucifer is no cakewalk. It is a challenging fight, it is an epic fight, but [it] also gives us enough room so that whatever comes afterward can be harder, if that makes sense. To beat Lucifer, you will still need to cooperate with your allies, you will still need to expand your arsenal, you will still need to equip the relics from Inferno. And you will need to learn how to use your weapons if you want to succeed.”

Dante’s Lucifer isn’t like the usual depictions of the devil in popular culture. Instead of a half-goat demon wreathed in fire, in Divine Comedy, Lucifer is a massive creature with three faces and bat-like wings. And it’s not fire that defines Lucifer in the Inferno but rather ice; he’s trapped up to his waist in a frozen lake, part of his eternal punishment for rebelling against God. Ertekin said the team was inspired by an illustration based on Divine Comedy by Gustave Doré called “Lucifer, King of Hell” when it came to Lucifer’s design and what kind of threats he could pose to players. 

While you’re trying to kill Lucifer, he’s also trying to kill you by using powerful spells capable of dealing massive amounts of damage. The spells take a while for Lucifer to cast, though, and players can try to counter them by completing objectives around the arena. So each player will have different roles they can fulfill. Some might want to destroy the implements of Lucifer’s spells, while others focus on dealing damage to the boss, and still others can fight off challenging “elite” enemies that storm the arena.

“To get that feeling that you’ve accomplished something big, a raid battle also needs to feel believable,” Ertekin explained. “It shouldn’t just be a sequence of attacks that the boss throws your way. So I’d like to think that there’s a sort of story in each combat encounter.”

While Lucifer’s frozen state means he’s not very mobile, he’ll still use his huge size, massive fists, and wings against you as well as things like ice shards from around the battlefield.

“The idea is that he is using the tools of his torment, in a way, against the players, so his sorrow, his anger, and so on,” Ertekin said. “And he’s casting these gigantic attacks, so you need to figure out a way to avoid dying. We liked the idea of that contrast [between ice and fire] a lot, so that’s why we really went hard on that.”

How many players you bring to fight Lucifer will greatly affect your chances of victory, Ertekin said. As with other roguelikes, though, death is part of the learning process. He said Thunder Lotus expects the community around 33 Immortals to learn as they work together to battle through the Inferno and take on Lucifer over and over. As everyone improves, so do your chances to make it to the boss and finally defeat him.

“You need to survive Inferno together, right? That’s like the challenge No. 1, you need to bring with you as many players as possible to Lucifer,” he said. “And if all 33 players reach Lucifer at the same time, then there’s a good chance that you will win this fight. If you bring roughly around 22 players, then the boss is going to be challenging, but it will still be doable. And if you’re at 11 players, then you better be extremely good players because this fight is going to require you to give it your all. And even in cases where there are fewer players, even if you’re at a ‘sub-optimal’ number of players—obviously, if you’re good enough, you can challenge anything you want—Lucifer has multiple health bars, and every time you empty one of those health bars, you are rewarded for it. So we have that intense incentive of, even if things look bleak, there’s a reason to keep fighting.”

Eventually, though, Lucifer will fall, and Ertekin said that the feeling of an epic raid battle should extend to the sense of victory that comes from triumphing over the massive demon.

“The kind of ideal vibe, I’ve described it as getting your first boss clear, and you’re there in the game, the loot fountain’s going wild, everyone is emoting like crazy, you’re taking your screenshots,” he said. “You get the feeling of accomplishment, that you’ve done something cool, you’ve done something challenging, and you did so because you work as part of a massive team, you’ve worked together, and that’s how you succeeded.”

But of course, Lucifer is just the game’s first boss. After the Inferno, Dante’s journey takes him through Purgatory and then Paradise, and you’ll face those trials as you continue through 33 Immortals as well. The ultimate goal is to take on God to secure your escape from damnation. So while Thunder Lotus intends for the King of Hell to be a great challenge to defeat, he’s still only the first one.

“In most stories, Lucifer is the ultimate evil, but if you look into it, the literal meaning of his name is the Morning Star, the Light-Bringer, which aren’t necessarily evil-sounding names,” Ertekin said. “And then in the Catholic lore, you look into the sin that he committed, it was helping humans rebel against the Almighty by giving them the [forbidden] fruit [in the Garden of Eden], by letting them know good from evil. And then you ask yourself, ‘Okay, what’s so bad about that? What’s so bad about humans knowing what’s good and what’s evil?’ And despite thinking about that yourself, he still incurs the wrath of god, and he gets punished. 

“So then it gets you to think, ‘What could be something that is still more powerful, still more angry, perhaps, than Lucifer, that’s out there? What could we lead to?’ I think that’s a fun way to approach our understanding of Lucifer in our game. Like where do we go from now? Those are the kinds of things I want people to start asking themselves the moment they beat Lucifer.”

The 33 Immortals closed beta starts on May 24 and runs until June 2. You can sign up for the beta on 33immortals.com for a chance to face Lucifer.