Talking to anyone about The Persistence is bound to almost always include comparisons to games like Resident Evil 7 and Dead Space. Though it’s easy to see how these comparisons exist, The Persistence is really doing something completely different. With Sci-Fi, Horror and Rogue-Like characteristics all rolled into one neat little package it’s hard to make any real direct comparisons to any of these games.
STORY
The premise is complicatedly simple; everyone on the ship is dead and you are brought to life inhabiting a cloned body of a deceased security guard by the trapped consciousness of the ship’s engineer, who is also very dead. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to explore the ship in your new body, searching for a way to repair the ship and get the heck out of there. You’ll find yourself fighting off other printed clones of various ex crew members, all of which have gone completely nuts and are trying to “kill” you faster than you can take them out. We say “kill” because, like any rogue-like, when you die you start all over again and try to get as far as you can until the next print of your body is terminated and another one is formed. Every time this happens your consciousness will be reborn in a new body.
Not only is your body reprinted every time you “die,” the ship continues to rebuild itself so each time you start over, the decks will be different and you must learn a completely new lay of the land. This tends to be a neat take on the procedurally generated aspect of the game. Unlike most in the genre, The Persistence makes sense of the procedurally generated nature of the game.
GAMEPLAY
Gear can be hard to come by and unfortunately is lost every time that you are reprinted. This makes it more imperative that you get as far as you can each time you go through the game. You are tasked with making your way through multiple decks and completing challenges which enable you to reach your goal and move on to the next deck. After completing a deck, you have the ability going forward to return to that deck without having to go through each deck first. This is a nice take on the rogue-like aspect of the game and fixes one of the more potentially annoying factors of the genre.
Sneaking up on your enemies is super effective as you are armed with only a steam cell extractor. Hand to hand combat is extremely week. Thankfully, you have a shield to use along with it so that you can defend yourself between weak offensive attacks. Using the stem cells and tokens you acquire, you can buy new weapons and gear as well as upgrade them. We must insist you be careful because, as we mentioned, once your playthrough ends… all is lost.
Players use a mixture of stealth and classic FPS gameplay akin to the likes of Dishonored. Even though your approach to how you tackle each deck is completely up to you, it’s best to become proficient with both types of play in order to complete the game. Not only are there weapons you can shoot, melee weapons are prevalent here and can be quite powerful. Half of the fun is trying out new weapon sets and seeing what works best.
CONTROLS
The Persistence tries to cater to every type of gamer by allowing you to pick from multiple control types. There is classic FPS with free moving cameras. However, if you prefer you can also teleport or use choppier turning to avoid motion sickness. While most games only give you one or two choices based on the limitations of the controller, the decision to use the Dual Shock 4 gives you a lot more options on how you play and control the game.
The game controls great and feels like a first-person shooter in VR should, but without the Move or Aim controllers it takes you out of the experience and doesn’t feel as immersive other games we’ve played.
Recommendation: If you are starved for a Sci-Fi Horror rogue-like game, look no further. While we’d say that the game is creepier than it is flat out scary, the setting will make you edgy. Hearing enemies from far away takes the suspense out of things a bit, but they are tough to take down, so there is still some challenge. In playing through The Persistence, you can’t help but wonder what a game like this could be if it had been given the Alien franchise to work with. Until that day comes and we can play Alien Isolation in VR, you could do a lot worse than The Persistence.
*The Persistence was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
