#The persistence enhanced review upgrade#

Other offensive options include conventional firearms, grenades, injectable buffs and power-ups, and a variety of novel tools.

You can also use it on the corpses of unique crew members to clone their bodies and utilise unique passive abilities. You always start with the “harvester”, able to instantly kill unaware or stunned enemies and harvest their stem cells. Moving around, aiming and shooting, switching between gear – it all feels natural. I’m certain the game never explicitly tells you there is a map as it’s essential for navigating to primary objectives and hunting secondary collectables. It encourages you to re-explore decks for secondary objectives and collectables, resource caches, and – if the RNG gods favour you – a deck module that might allow you to teleport straight to one of the four decks. As each deck is of a manageable size and, once completed, the teleport to the next deck is moved close to the starting point, The Persistence ditches most of the grind required in other roguelikes. Should you die, your current arsenal of guns, grenades, and tools is forfeit, but you keep all your unlocked upgrades, collected resources, and even mission progress. The basic gameplay loop involves pushing towards an objective, avoiding or killing deranged clones, and hoovering all the resources you can (stem cells for character upgrades, tokens for armoury upgrades, and fabrication kits for purchasing unlocked items at vendor terminals). It keeps things fresh (for a while at any rate) though you can find map terminals that direct you towards primary and secondary objectives. In addition to boosting character attributes, crafting gear, and unlocking new weapons, fallen crew members can be harvested for their DNA to provide a new clone body with unique perks.įor reasons barely explained, the ship shifts layouts between runs. Stealth becomes a strategic option, but it is only truly mandatory in your opening hour. As a result, you will find you get powerful much quicker than most games in the genre.

#The persistence enhanced review upgrade#

Should you fall – to either hard-hitting enemies or environmental hazards – your brain backup is placed in another clone body.Īfter a somewhat slow start – which might convince you this is another stealth-focused, defenceless horror game – things pick up when you discover The Persistence has a forgiving death mechanic, plenty of resources to find on each run, an extensive arsenal of weapons (and other offensive tools), and a character upgrade system.

You start in the restoration bay and are initially able to teleport to the research deck to begin your adventure. There are four major decks and a finale, with one primary objective and a few secondary tasks you can complete for bonus resources or character buffs. Overused story beats aside, it is the perfect setup for a game structured around repeated runs through different parts of the ship. Dubious research vessels and black hole anomalies – what could go wrong? The premise is simple if a little cliched: a science vessel conducting dubious human-cloning experiments encounters an anomaly near a black hole cloning vats start churning out deranged mutants that kill of most of the crew a solitary survivor restores the brain scan of a security officer to her cloned body and tasks her with restoring ship functions. It is a first-person, horror/sci-fi roguelike that has you pushing further and further into the labyrinthine corridors of the titular ship.