As a stranger to both survival-horror and VR experiences, the latter mostly due to motion sickness, it was great to see that The Persistence was coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox One on 21st May after its 2018 outing thanks to Firesprite. I had a chance to try a preview build to see how The Persistence translates to standard console play.
A spaceship aptly named ‘The Persistence’ has mysteriously seized all activity near a black hole. The ship’s builder has managed to bring one of its dead crew back to life thanks to the advent of clone building.
You will soon become familiar with the in-game currency of stem-cells which are used to upgrade their clones in the categories pictured. Stems can be extracted from the zombie-like antagonists dotted around the ship
Playing the Rogue
As players progress though the game they will discover that the ship is procedurally-generated and akin to the rogue-like genre. Only consumables and weapons disappear when you respawn while armory and clone upgrades remain.
The beauty of the narrative is within its explanation of all of these rogue-like features are feasible given the advent of cloning technology and being stuck next to a black hole. Immersion is possibly the biggest focus of The Persistence.
Some relics of its VR origins remain, such as teleporting for easier maneuvering, a giant cursor in the middle of the screen and auto pickups and interactions. These features however translate well and feel natural. It’s clear that these features were left in as core game-play mechanics to create immersion.
Ironing Out the Small Stuff
As readers may be able to tell from the screenshots, The titles VR style menus have also been kept intact. Sometimes text overlapping can occur due to more traditional control methods being used. This is a small issue that could be ironed out by the developer quite easily.
Movement is always an annoyance in survival horrors for players used to arena shooters and action platformers, but it also builds up angst and atmosphere. Whilst The Persistence plays ball with these ideals, movement feels floaty and un-tuned. Firesprite has given players the option to increase the speed of the X and Y axis thumbsticks which helped somewhat (1.4x felt the most natural during this preview) but it’s still an issue.
For this writer, PSVR visuals have always been shocking from the headset perspective. As mentioned earlier, the PSVR gives me terrible motion sickness due to the low resolution of the technology. That being said, footage from PSVR playthroughs captured from HDMI outputs looks crisp and clean. The Persistence skips the muddy screen effect most Nintendo Switch ports suffer from and provides a tidy presentation with an optimised HUD for handheld play.
I also encountered issues with the soundtrack being much louder than character speech and sound effects during my preview. Firesprite did include volume levels as am option in the main menu.
A Persistent Performer
The final release of The Persistence on Nintendo Switch looks promising. The issues I referred to in this preview are based on an unfinished build and are far from game-breaking.
A couple of framerate drops were noticeable during handheld and docked play. Something which is to be expected from a home-console port, but again didn’t detract much from the experience.
The Persistence releases on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One on Friday, 21st May 2020.
