If you find yourself in a combat situation, the game becomes a case of parrying mutant attacks with your shield at the right time, then following up with a melee hit. The best way to approach this moment is with stealth and picking enemies off one at a time. Without weapons, you are stuck with your shield and a weedy melee attack which is very slow to use. Other times, you aren’t as lucky and as a result, you need to simply make do with what you have. When using this on one of the games largest foes, this essentially made me unstoppable for the deck I was on as I would simply let my pet brute force our way through, while I stocked up on more of the same weapon, should they keel over. I was then further bolstered by a melee weapon that allowed me to befriend one of my mutant attackers, making them a pet that would essentially take hits for me.

One run I experienced had this happen, I found a weapon vendor early on, allowing me to ignore stealth where it would have been more difficult and just shoot my way through areas. If you’re lucky, then the right combination of melee and ranged firepower can make some areas an absolute cakewalk. You can find vending machines that can dispense guns, grenades, or experimental ordinance. Sometimes, you can get a run that feels like everything is handed to you on a silver platter. However, there are equal moments where you as the player can feel overpowered or underpowered and this all comes down to room structure and the various currencies you collect throughout each deck. The game is very challenging, as most are in this genre. Where The Persistence differs though, is in the balancing. Of course, none of this will be new to seasoned roguelike players, the concept of modular rooms and reshuffling enemy and weapon placements are standard fare for the roguelike genre. However, each time this happens, the layout of each deck, enemy placements and vending machine gets altered, meaning that the Persistence is never quite the same as it was before you kicked the bucket. When you die, instead of reawakening with progress lost, you are instead awoken as another clone, only with the memories and progress on major tasks that were previously achieved. To escape The Persistence, Zimri must venture through four decks of the ship, completing a main task on each while trying to navigate and survive the various horrors on board.Īs a clone, you can see where the roguelike mechanics come in here. As the result of a nearby black hole, the ship has entered disarray, mutating crewmates into abstract horrors while also making the ship hazardous in the form of electrical faults and failed systems. In this moody adventure, you play as Zimri, a clone of a previously expired security officer who has been brought back to life by Serena, an engineer and lone survivor of the starship Persistence. Enhanced for PS5, The Persistence is back, shedding its original VR guise and embracing other benefits, such as ray tracing, haptics, and an overall higher fidelity skin. That is of course, if you forget about the original release of The Persistence which debuted on PSVR back in 2018, which took similar death-filled cues from Rogue Legacy and baked them into an atomospheric, dread filled experience. Out of all settings though, Sci-fi horror is not one we see much of, with only Returnal coming to mind in recent memory. We’ve seen the lot, from traditional side-scrollers like Rogue Legacy, to off-the-wall rhythm action games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, there is a Roguelike for just about anyone. The key to their success it seems, is finding another genre that gels well with the underlying formula and make it fit. You’d be forgiven if you thought that this is becoming a tiring trend, but when thinking about it, there are few games that are treated poorly by the die-try again mechanics that Roguelikes champion. There is not a month that goes by where we don’t see the phrase come up to describe a potential new indie darling, least of all with April’s Returnal, which saw the sub-genre make its way to the triple-A echelons. Jin PS5 / Reviews tagged repetitive / roguelike / scifi.

The persistence review