They try to describe The Persistence as an Action, Adventure, Survival, Stealth, Roguelike, Horror game. With co-op elements.
Virtual Reality is dead is a sentence I hear a lot. Still in its infancy in many ways, VR has a long way to go to fully establish itself it’s true. But dead? I don’t think so. Beat Saber is a heap of fun and it’s not even ‘finished’ yet. Resident Evil 7 was amazing, even on the ‘underpowered’ PSVR. Moss is just gorgeous, and I am resisting buying it again so I can play it on the Vive.
Most of the ‘best’ VR games have something in common though – they are all short experiences. Dedicate an afternoon, and you will see the end credits. Keep getting zapped by the alien around the third corner? Enough retries, you will get him. I know that’s how I got through a lot of Resident Evil 7 early on.
But what if the bad guy wasn’t always around the third corner? This is part of the appeal of Roguelike games. You always have the same goals, but the layout and enemies are always different. Thinking of playing Resident Evil where the house layout was different every time I died – now there is a challenge!
Firesprite not only thought this challenge would be a good idea but added a bunch of twists and packaged it as The Persistence. One of the most anticipated titles for PSVR this year, The Persistence is available this week.
Story elements at the moment are pretty light. You are on a colony ship where the crew is dead, and mutants have overrun the ship. If that wasn’t bad enough, your ship is also damaged and near a black hole. So, basically that feeling you get Monday morning.
Armed with a clone printer and the electronic recordings of the Security Office and Engineer, you set out to somehow repair the ship and survive whatever has happened.
This is not a game for a light casual pick up and put down session.
Stealth will be a major part of The Persistence, and Firesprite has bumped up a mechanic from Alien: Isolation. In Alien, you could play with the camera and physically move your head to peek around boxes. The microphone also picked up on sounds in the room. This meant the Alien could ‘hear’ you – nothing terrifying about that when you were hiding.
But this was playing on a flat screen with a feature you could switch off. In The Persistence, you will have to actually duck down and hide behind boxes from mutant enemies. There is also a mechanic where you will need to sneak up on them and incapacitate them to harvest material. Immersive gameplay seems to be on the cards.
There is also a second screen mode to play with a friend. This took a couple of minutes for me to get my head around – a second screen in VR?
What it means is a friend can log in and join your game on a phone or tablet. They won’t be fighting with you but would have hacked into the ship’s computer. This way, they can help you out with enemy locations or opening doors and lockers.
Or they can help kill you by luring enemies and getting advantages in their own game. Maybe be careful getting your best frenemy to help you up front 🙂
My PSVR hasn’t been neglected, but the Vive has definitely taken the lead in most playtime recently. Beat Saber on PSVR will probably lead to two players in my house playing on two different systems at the same time.
Everything is looking good for The Persistence to pull me into a new world, and I can’t wait to give it a good run and a formal review.
Until next time,