The Haunted Hoard: The Persistence (PS4)
Deep in outer space, a vessel known as The Persistence drifts towards its doom. A black hole has it in its gravitational grip and the entire crew is either dead or has turned into one of shambling mutated creatures responsible for the deaths of the others. The spaceship seems all but doomed, but this space ship has had remarkable prescience in backing up the consciousnesses of two of its crew. One of them is security officer Zimri, the other a woman who helped design the ship named Serena, and thanks to a device that can create cloned bodies to house these backed up minds, there is still hope The Persistence can escape its seemingly inevitable destruction.
In this first-person horror game available both in standard and virtual reality play, you are Zimri, the mind that is being put into the cloned bodies while Serena serves as a knowledgeable voice to guide you through the tasks necessary to save The Persistence and those few minds aboard that are still salvageable. While much of the conversation between the two focuses on the mission at hand since trying to escape the pull of a black hole is a rather pressing issue, Zimri can find rooms aboard the ship that trigger conversations. Sometimes this involves finding the remains of someone important to The Persistence’s previous operations, and due to the dire situation you find yourself in, you’ll not only reflect on their unfortunate end but take a copy of their DNA since having a more capable body can give you a better chance at success. Sometimes though you’ll just find a safe medical room to stock up and rest in for a spell, Zimri and Serena starting to learn a bit more about each other so they come to better understand what they’re fighting for beyond basic survival. The Persistence doesn’t focus too heavily on the narrative side of things, it botches a late game reveal by throwing it on a stack of incoming information rather than giving it time to be considered, but the more personal motives of the characters and the broad details of the science fiction setting still come across well enough.
Exploring The Persistence to activate key parts of the ship will routinely put you in danger of being attacked by the mutants who patrol its halls. When the game begins, you only have a Harvester, a tool able to stealth kill weaker enemies from behind with a taser-like shot but anything that faces you head on will have to be weakly smacked away. While a very low-powered start, it teaches you pretty early on that The Persistence is not a game about running around guns blazing. Ammunition will be limited even after you start unlocking things, sneaking up to kill something will be vital even when you can start firing guns or utilizing unique offensive tools, and as you get into the later decks, even with all your upgrades, death can come surprisingly quickly if you are brash and believe too highly in your power. Luckily, each floor has stations where you can purchase new weapons and items for use in fighting back against the mutants, but you’ll need to pick apart the areas you move through a lot to do so. There are ample amounts of Stem Cells for permanent upgrades to newly made clones, Fabricator Chips that are used to purchase the weapons, and Erebus Tokens that unlock those weapons and can upgrade them, but they are often found in small amounts so that the increase in power isn’t too rapid even if you scour each room you explore.
The weapons in The Persistence are a surprisingly superb set of tools that, even though they are kept in check to ensure that the enemies remain terrifying threats even to the end, are remarkably creative and have wonderfully realized animations. Simply getting one from a fabrication machine already has Zimri take a moment to appreciate your new tool with detailed movements that make even the tools with simple concepts feel more advanced, and their use cases vary enough that choosing which one to fabricate isn’t always a straightforward decision. The Grav Hook is a satisfying tool that can seize an enemy and let you fling them around to batter them against the walls and flooring, it an excellent counter to some of the enemies who thought they could leap out and strike you while you’re surprised. Swarm Droids are deployed and will fly off to attack an enemy on their own, their low power meaning they can’t tackle the tougher mutants but they do provide useful back-up and can even harass foes you’re worried about approaching to soften them up for your follow-up attacks. If you’re feeling bold, getting in close with an Ivy Serum can turn even mutants as fearsome as the hulking Berserkers into an ally that lasts as long as it lives. Some more grounded weapon concepts are found in the bunch, a riot baton for smacking things around, a pistol that sits in a sort of middle ground on power and ammo abundance to contrast the rapid fire weak options and revolver that fires more slowly but deals far more damage, but these are still given the nice animation touches and won’t end up dominating your tool kit. Too many foes are dangerous to alert with gunshots and some you will die to if you try to get in close with a melee weapon, so there is room and reason to explore this eclectic arsenal.
These weapons do require making them yourself during trips through The Persistence’s decks or getting the rare lucky find of one out in the open, but you have some consistent abilities like a short range teleport and a forcefield. The teleport makes up for a lack of sprinting and can even help you reach places in more vertical rooms, but the forcefield can deplete rather quickly even against the attacks it is made to counter. Both of these skills pull from a dark matter resource that replenishes after a small delay so raising your forcefield can invalidate the more useful teleport briefly, but they are also joined by your all too necessary Supersense in tapping those replenishing but taxed reserves. Supersense is crucial in The Persistence because the cramped hallways or dark cluttered rooms of the vessel you’re exploring will have creatures who will try to and very well easily could kill you if they spot you while others are designed specifically to leap out at you as jump scares. Supersense sends out a green pulse that reveals nearby figures so that you aren’t always being caught by a deadly surprise and you will need to use it frequently if you want to avoid unexpected and often immediate deaths. That doesn’t make the sneaking totally without tension, you’ll still lurk around trying to avoid detection while trying to set up whatever kill method you’re choosing for that mutant creature, but because spaces aren’t designed for good visibility, Supersense will be a constant necessary part of exploring the ship decks even if it robs some of the tension of what lies behind the next corner.
The Persistence is able to keep you from learning its halls though, it actually taking inspiration from rogue-like games with certain elements of its design. On death you pop back to the room where you spawn a new body, upgrade your stats, and can make new armor with schematics enemies sometimes drop, but you’re back to just your Harvester and need to acquire new weapons as you plunge back into The Persistence’s other decks. Your currencies carry over thankfully, but you’ll need to revisit Fabricators to stock up your arsenal once again. There are four major decks to explore and you can unlock ways to teleport immediately to a deck so you can focus on locating whatever story area exists at that level, but if you teleport down to deck four and expect to get work done you will soon receive a deadly reminder that you can’t walk around underequipped. Each level introduces new enemy types and they grow stronger, have new tricks, or even become almost entirely resistant to things like the Harvester or certain attack approaches. If you teleport to deck four and don’t find Fabricators quickly, there is no way you’ll progress with the story objectives before even some of the weaker mutants on that floor make your health easily disappear. As such, you’ll probably want to jump back into deck 1 every time you revive, mostly because the fabricators will offer the same weapons no matter the floor and you can stock up where the mutants aren’t as much of a concern.
This does lead to some late-game issues. You’ll do that stocking up on the first floor and then make your way to the area of the ship you need to be in, but with how quickly a death may come, you can lose it all and be sent back to do the slow acquisitions all over again. Fabricators have short recharge periods so you can equip yourself too quickly for that next run and since they’re all themed to specific weapon types you’ll need to hunt down the appropriate ones if you want to round out your arsenal, but at least the teleporters that take you from one deck to the next are always rather close to each other as long as you’ve previously completed that deck. It’s a small path from the entrance to exit for the floors you only would want to acquire materials on while the decks where you still need to perform the important goals to complete the story can try to lay things out to still remain difficult. The floors are actually being shifted around each time you visit them, the layout not quite the same as different room types are chained together through mild randomization. Outside of very specific special rooms like the supply crate challenge rooms though, most areas lack individuality, a lot of variations on things like a busy corridor or a two-floor space with computers or equipment to hide behind making up most of the space you’ll traverse. This reliance more on building up your reserves yourself rather than randomly finding upgrades and the floor layouts not really feeling like they have many distinct locations does mean this might not click with people who came to the game for rogue-like elements, but the ship changing its shape does stave off some repetitiveness. Rather than retreading familiar ground to get to that area you died in, things are lightly shuffled, and that helps the horror too some since you won’t know which creatures might be patrolling that space and you need to stay on your toes or something will catch you by surprise.
The Persistence has no boss battles, the major highlight of a floor being the story-related space that will face you with a unique challenge like utilizing a provided weapon for puzzle solving or being made to repel a sudden surge of enemies in a game otherwise focused on confrontations you can try to control the pace of. The normal enemies you face aboard the ship do come in enough varieties that there are more aggressive and more fearsome dangers to find as you explore. Human-like mutants might try and smack you or shoot at you, their guns being surprisingly strong, but special foes like the Weeper and Bloodhound keep you feeling vulnerable. The Weeper is hard to shoot at conventionally as they’ll teleport away from most types of aggression, trying to find a spot you’re not watching to drain you with a powerful beam of energy. The Bloodhound wreathed in crackling purple electricity conversely is a very obvious threat, one even marked on the map so you can track it, because it takes a lot of aggression to put down and will kill you instantly if it can reach you with its slow ominous march. There are moments when The Persistence’s enemy types are effective and others where it feels like it is throwing around a bit too many without consideration for your likelihood of overcoming them within your limitations, this likely a product of the randomized elements, so it can be sometimes frustrating to be thrown back to the cloning pod because the room was filled with foes you really would need to be kitted up to reasonably maneuver around. Some tools like Invisibility to slip past or even the Rage Serum that makes you a briefly invincible fist fighter can get around these, but unless you’re going to invest in the restock every time you go down, you might not have these on hand or even have the time to whip them out when they would be best used.
THE VERDICT: The Persistence has a positively excellent set of weapons that are often wonderfully animated to boot, but when it comes to the game you use them in things are a bit rocky. Enemies manage to be formidable and terrifying throughout and the floor layout randomization means you can’t ever just charge forward knowing you can handle what’s ahead, but the late game mutants and challenges will lead to moments spent slowly kitting up so you even have a small chance at survival. Enemies can kill you surprisingly quickly which encourages the careful and clever use of your unique weapons and tools, but the rearranged areas on repeat visits after a death don’t stand out enough for that to be a major appeal. Using your special resources to get an advantage against such tough opposition is somewhat satisfying, but the process isn’t quite smooth enough to make this an incredibly compelling bit of sci-fi horror.
And so, I give The Persistence for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. The tedious acquisition of equipment with each new life to have a hope of surviving in later floors and late game situations really puts a damper on The Persistence’s flow, but it does have a lot going for it elsewhere. The early game weakness before you can afford the nifty weapons on offer matches the threat level without throwing things like the Weepers and Bloodhounds at you yet that expect you to have certain counters or else you’re out of luck. Getting to those stronger enemies with the right weapons doesn’t invalidate their danger either since they are designed to have advantages beyond their resistances, but having even the simpler mutants in the later decks be able to kill you with two gunshots that won’t miss if fired does make some late game exploring a little frustrating. There is a lot to like in how you can find use cases for the special weapons on offer, it not feeling like you’ll just end up using the more standard weaponry because the special advantages offered by such things as the Grav Hook or Swarm Drones stand out and overcome certain obstacles better. Scouring around for resources isn’t even a bad way to fill the time between the tense sneaking sessions where you try to kill a foe with minimal trouble and prices often feel right for ensuring you don’t get too powerful too easily or too early on. However, some consideration on how to handle weapon acquisition in the lower decks does feel like it could have helped clean up the process some, perhaps an expensive purchase that lets you grab a guaranteed weapon when reaching that floor would mean you wouldn’t have to putter around deck 1 for Fabricators every time you want to head down and continue the story. Some better adjustment of how the weaker enemies are handled in lower decks could also make it at least more understandable when you meet a quick end since it would have to be something more formidable, but The Persistence straddles an uneasy line thanks to its measured inclusion of rogue-like elements where having them makes some of the danger level last longer due to the uncertainty on what lies ahead but it also leads to late game fatigue as you have to invest too much in yourself to have a hope of making it deeper in.
The Persistence was probably wise to include its rogue-like design choices in the end, the small shake-ups actually complementary to the horror elements and also good for making you experiment with a weapon set that deserves that degree of exploration. The deck system as presented isn’t really about plunging in and building up your power gradually though, Fabricators found on every floor so there’s no reason to dilly-dally on a level where you’ve finished all its important story content. Buy all your resources and head where you need to go, but that approach at least mostly comes up around the end. The early stages when you can’t afford everything in the Fabricators and haven’t figured out the ship too well yet are an effective start in both gameplay and atmosphere, but The Persistence needed to adjust its mechanics as the experience shifted over time, the persistent design elements not a perfect fit and thus the game feels held back some from showcasing its best ideas.