Deepest Trench

Favor Games’ debut sends two divers, Rob and Maria, down to a dead military research station at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, tasked with restoring power and oxygen while piecing together why the place went silent. It’s built around cooperative play — split-screen or Remote Play Together — though a solo mode exists for anyone without a partner on hand.

The setting is doing real work

However the rest of it plays out, the pitch is genuinely rare: a fully cooperative underwater survival-mystery is a lane almost nothing else is working in. Reviewers who’ve spent time with it consistently point to the same strength — the sound design and lighting carry a real sense of isolation, with distant clanks and unexplained creature calls doing more atmospheric heavy lifting than the narrative itself manages. That’s a meaningful accomplishment for a first-time studio’s first release, and it’s reason enough for the premise to earn attention even before the gameplay is weighed.

Where it runs into trouble

The critical consensus so far is less kind to the moment-to-moment design. Enemy encounters — sharks in particular — have been described as overtuned to the point of removing agency: little room to react or plan before a forced restart, which reads as tension on paper but frustration in practice. The puzzles meant to carry the “mind-bending mystery” framing from the store page have drawn similar criticism, coming across as cryptic and under-explained rather than genuinely clever. Multiple reviewers also flag a pacing dip through the middle stretch that blunts the impact the ending is clearly reaching for.

Worth noting: this one’s still under the radar

Nearly two years after release, Deepest Trench sits at single digits of user reviews on Steam — not enough for the platform to even generate a score. That’s not a knock on the game itself, but it does mean there’s very little independent word-of-mouth to lean on beyond a handful of outlet reviews, and your mileage with a specific co-op partner may vary more than usual for a game this under-discussed.

Verdict

Deepest Trench picks a setting few other games are brave enough to build a whole co-op experience around, and the atmosphere mostly delivers on that promise. But combat balance and puzzle clarity are real, repeatedly-flagged problems, and the story doesn’t quite reach the depths its premise promises. Worth keeping an eye on if you’ve got a regular co-op partner and a soft spot for underwater horror — just go in with tempered expectations on the puzzles and the sharks alike, and consider waiting to see whether balance patches land before paying full price.