The Persistence Enhanced (Xbox Series X)

There’s honestly a gap in the market, some absolute banging VR games, are still not available to play with a normal controller. Some of these make sense, for example Beat Sabre. It pretty much wouldn’t be playable on controller. Yet other like Half-Life Alyx absolutely beg to be ported to modern systems, or to be playable without VR.

Yet here we are with The Persistence, a game initially launched for PSVR by Firesprite (the team who worked on PSVR favourite The Playroom). Now ported and updated for PC and modern hardware, and if you’re a previous digital Xbox One or PS4 owner of the game, you’ll be able to play the Enhanced version for absolutely free.

The game itself is a First Person Roguelike with a survival horror aspect. The usual sci-fi story of being set on a deep space colony, after something has left everyone on board an absolute state, applies here. Yet you play as a clone created by the ships AI, obviously you need to figure out what’s happened and get off the ship. The gameplay here is as you would expect from a survival horror title, a bit slower, a bit more methodical, and a bit of a looting is required. As well with a roguelike you’re going to be dying a good amount of time, there’s no permadeath, but upon death you’ll be losing them items and things you’ve collected on the way.

There’s a good degree of stealth in the earlier parts of the game as you’re trying to get upgraded and find a decent weapon, but once you’re kitted out you can be a bit more aggressive. You have a crafting station (Firearms Fabricator) to also upgrade and create to get you them later level weapons to keep the playing field a bit more level.

Visually I didn’t find anything too wrong with The Persistence, the environments look as they would be in any sci-fi movie, the enemies had a nice rotten look about them. I was never expecting a AAA title from it, as such there were no real issues with how it looks. It runs at a silky 40k 60fps on Xbox One (Series S/X), and also 4k 30fps with ray tracing on Series X, these both ran without any huge hiccups on my Series X, you can expect the same performance on a PS5 also, with the addition of Immersive haptic feedback on a PS5 Dualsense controller.

I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of room for replay-ability unless you really wanted to unlock everything, however if you were after something a little different from a Roguelike then The Persistence is easily worth a shot you’ll probably finish it in a decent time, and enjoy yourself.

3

Summary

Fun little sci-fi romp

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