KickStarter Peripeteia - Deus Ex-inspired FPS/RPG set in anime cyberpunk Poland - now available on Early Access

[Jenkem]

devs are WOKE

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Game is really rough. The levels are really massive (as the devs would like to remind you), which naturally means they are also really empty. Almost all the systems have several bugs. Darkness level in the maps don't correctly translate to the visibility meter / npc detection. Volume balancing is absolutely retarded (and maybe actual evidence for whoever responsible for it is either really hard of hearing, or mentally impaired). This is also one of the few games where I would go as far as saying the programming is probably a fucking mess, despite not having seen the actual code.

Makes you wonder what the fuck they were doing for the past 4 and a half years. It's as schizocore game made by possibly actual schizos.

 

[Jenkem]

I told you it was a government grant scam bros, I told you.

 

[Konjad]

Wow, just touching water with your toe insta-kills you.

EDIT: Apparently some water does, and some doesn't.


Thanks,
Sherry
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to Skinwalker's

 

[Konjad]

Also, factions are at war but don't fight each other, just you?

Thanks,
Sherry
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to Skinwalker's

 

[Maxie]

Bought it. If it's shit, I'll never forgive you Shodanon

Doesn't matter at all. You will buy this Polish product.

 

[Gumsmith]

Also, factions are at war but don't fight each other, just you?

Thanks,
Sherry
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to Skinwalker's

On my third level one of the quest givers died because his faction enemies found him while I was exploring.

 

[Spukrian]

 

[Roguey]

I complained about the levels being too large in 2022, but some devs just don't want to listen

I played the first demo and it was indeed good though suffered a bit from amateur Deus Ex modder syndrome of having levels larger than they ought to be.

It is funny seeing people seethe about the complete lack of direction which is

 

[Abu Antar]

I, too found the levels too big for their own good when I played the demo. This was a few years ago.

 

[thesecret1]

Alright, dicked around a bit. Game's alright, has a lot of charm, but is also very rough around the edges. Bugs are plentiful (albeit usually not critical ones), and I did manage to softlock myself (you can enter an elevator and go up... but if you later parkour down, you'll find you cannot call the elevator back down again), but this stuff can be fixed in EA.

As for the big maps, it is indeed an issue. Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all. It's life half the map could be cut, and the only thing you'd lose would be miles of emptiness. The maps also have this annoying habit of leading you for a long time through yet more corridors into some big area that looks like there should be something there... but there isn't. You just wasted time. It makes exploration rather frustrating.

Still, I can see myself playing the full version for the vibes alone.

 

[normie]

Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all. It's life half the map could be cut, and the only thing you'd lose would be miles of emptiness. The maps also have this annoying habit of leading you for a long time through yet more corridors into some big area that looks like there should be something there... but there isn't.

just like EYE Divine!!!

 

[thesecret1]

Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all. It's life half the map could be cut, and the only thing you'd lose would be miles of emptiness. The maps also have this annoying habit of leading you for a long time through yet more corridors into some big area that looks like there should be something there... but there isn't.

just like EYE Divine!!!

On that note, it's very easy to break your legs in this game.

 

[normie]

Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all. It's life half the map could be cut, and the only thing you'd lose would be miles of emptiness. The maps also have this annoying habit of leading you for a long time through yet more corridors into some big area that looks like there should be something there... but there isn't.

just like EYE Divine!!!

On that note, it's very easy to break your legs in this game.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

As for the big maps, it is indeed an issue. Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all.

One of the major aesthetic inspirations of this game is the manga Blame! where the protagonist explores a massive, mostly empty dead city. The problem is that the devs wanted to marry the sense of isolation of exploring a dead world with the gameplay of an imsim / RPG. Now granted, they have made an imsim, and they have made that kind of exploratory experience as well, but it's a dysfunctional marriage where both parties are suffering under the weight of the devs inability to make things work. The two elements don't mesh well together, because the gameplay is broken and buggy, and the exploration is meaningless since the sights are not *that* interesting, and not that *meaningful*, unlike the manga.

 

[thesecret1]

As for the big maps, it is indeed an issue. Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all.

One of the major aesthetic inspirations of this game is the manga Blame! where the protagonist explores a massive, mostly empty dead city. The problem is that the devs wanted to marry the sense of isolation of exploring a dead world with the gameplay of an imsim / RPG. Now granted, they have made an imsim, and they have made that kind of exploratory experience as well, but it's a dysfunctional marriage where both parties are suffering under the weight of the devs inability to make things work. The two elements don't mesh well together, because the gameplay is broken and buggy, and the exploration is meaningless since the sights are not *that* interesting, and not that *meaningful*, unlike the manga.

To be fair, there are a couple instances where I can see that kind of aesthetic shine through, such as when you scale a fuckhueg commie block, but more often than not, I'm spending half a minute running down a completely empty, non-descript tunnel.

 

[lightbane]

If it's meant to be Soviet Poland, wouldn't it mean that empty, pointless and depressing locations are on brand?

 

[v1c70r14]

As for the big maps, it is indeed an issue. Very often I find myself running down a massive, empty corridor that really performs no function at all.

One of the major aesthetic inspirations of this game is the manga Blame! where the protagonist explores a massive, mostly empty dead city. The problem is that the devs wanted to marry the sense of isolation of exploring a dead world with the gameplay of an imsim / RPG. Now granted, they have made an imsim, and they have made that kind of exploratory experience as well, but it's a dysfunctional marriage where both parties are suffering under the weight of the devs inability to make things work. The two elements don't mesh well together, because the gameplay is broken and buggy, and the exploration is meaningless since the sights are not *that* interesting, and not that *meaningful*, unlike the manga.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this post, I've already written at some length about what I thought made the imsims and first-person action-RPGs work in the context of Bloodlines, not tooting my own horn but it'd be tiresome to repeat it all here, unnecessary too. There I made the argument that Deus Ex and Bloodlines had nailed the more or less perfect scope in terms of playing area to sell what it was going for while still retaining meaningful levels for gameplay purposes, not too big, not too small. A couple of decently large hubs, and very distinct locations you could go to from them.

There's a natural tension between absolutely massive levels and imsim hyperdetailed interactions. There's not much to add to that but to think about what made games exploring that kind of scale did right to make it all come together. Not that long ago I was playing Shadow of the Colossus on original PS2 hardware and what I found there was that all the conventional wisdom you hear a lot of, that emptiness is bad, that you have to populate every square foot with unique things and "stuff to do", and the rest of it just wasn't true for that game. It had minimal systems, you had your horse, your sword and your bow, and along the way to the fights you could explore to find small boosts to your health and strength by eating lizards and fruits. There were no trashmobs, you didn't really need to upgrade at all to defeat the bosses that made up the challenge of the game, but exploring there felt more satisfying than in any other game, even much lauded RPGs like Morrowind that some say is a decent walking sim. SotC was great at communicating distance to the player, never going so far as to devolve into tedium, yet actually giving a feeling of having traveled a decent long way. The large plains, desert sands and rocky surfaces all only sold the experience even better than a dense game would have.

Imsims are generally about looking for resources, fueling your special bar so you can use your powers, getting upgrades, new weapon and tools, scrounging up cash for the few shops that exist. Mission sized areas with enough wiggle room to approach a target from many directions and ways, but not much more than that. If you cross some large megastructure in an imsim you'd expect to get something mechanically for the effort. The genre is a terrible fit for exploring massive spaces because if you don't want to make with 1% Josh Sawyerian boosts and have items, upgrades, and the rest retain their impact you can't simply pepper the landscape with them. A million stale chocolate bars giving you +5 HP stuffed away into generic lockers spread out through a post-Poland industrial hellscape isn't very interesting, but neither is finding an OP sniper rifle on every rooftop you can climb onto. There is just no way to win within the context of the reward system and mechanics.

I always wanted a game that had the scale of a TeamIco game but set within a far-future setting like Blame! letting me climb around or speed through megastructures on some vehicle without pointless busywork or poor attempts at dopamine rewards that I'd have to stop for, something more minimalist and slimmed down compared to just about any contemporary made game. Not a walking sim, just something that put all emphasis on navigating the world, with some sort of gameplay challenge at the end of it being the goal. Playing around with a pirated (not giving money to Poland even if the game was good) Peripeteia for a bit I don't think this is it either, having been disappointed by other indie titles before, some of which I'll get into for the benefit of anyone else having a Blame! video game deficiency like me.

Supposedly Babbdi was intended to be a similar game without the imsim elements, and I had fun for a bit with it. Ultimately though it was frustrating since I didn't care much for the general brushstrokes giving impressions of individual apartments, more focused games do that kind of thing much better. Beyond the city though were these massive empty spaces and shapes that seemed far more compelling to explore once I was able to zoom around the city without effort but the player is trapped within an invisible box around the city and don't get to explore them at all, the most compelling expanse being beyond the player's reach.

Babbdi Screenshots

NaissanceE came closer, also a free game, but the puzzles that it used for gameplay to keep it from being a walking sim weren't very compelling, and the entire game being untextured didn't help sell the aesthetics. Even so it was very impressive at times in terms of sheer scale and making you feel by walking around in it just how big it all really is.

NaissanceE Screenshots

Other worthy mentions are Beton Brutal, which to some degree builds on both Getting Over It with the ability to fall without dying being a central mechanic and the ascent being the challenge, but more importantly Mirror's Edge's parkour gameplay. Some sections in Mirror's Edge does despite not intentionally going for it does scratch the right itch, with massive industrial spaces, underground areas and other sections of the game giving you something more interesting than the usual fare of forest, jungle or other natural setting, or the standard urban street, all of which have been done to death.

Mirror's Edge Screenshots

The game that perfectly captures Blame! and other media in the same vein still hasn't been made despite all these efforts and it's a pretty big letdown that Peripeteia didn't deliver on this either. Big budget devs would never experiment like that when games cost so much to make these days and publishers are increasingly stingy, meanwhile indies just don't have the manpower, budget, or design acumen to make the Ico/SotC experience work, much less something building on that and delivering on the full fantasy of Blame!. I still have hope though that one day we'll get the megastructure dead far-future hyper-city exploration game that some of us have been dreaming about. The imsim parts are the least interesting bits of this game, I've played Deus Ex, Dishonored, System Shock, the rest, but I've never played a game that lets you slide downhill on the slope of some gigantic concrete or steel pyramid in a game all about making the player feel small inside a much larger space, surfaces that extend for miles into unknown distant constructs equally as gargantuan in a desolate tomb world populated with sparse tribes of human survivors and rotting aeon old cyborgs. In Peripeteia you can at most get a glimpse of that.

 

[JarlFrank]

I, too found the levels too big for their own good when I played the demo. This was a few years ago.

Bought it and gave it a try, gonna put it on hold for now because of bugs (after reloading a save after I died, my gun stopped working, doesn't shoot when I left click; searched the Steam forums for the bug and apparently items no longer working is a bug that sometimes happens based on how you arrange them in your inventory grid, so yeah, gotta give this some time for bugfixing). Explored enough to get a good impression of the levels.

Yes, they're too big, but it's not necessarily a bad thing for what the game is trying to do. It reminds me of Bleak Faith: Forsaken, which I recently completed and reviewed.
The environments are huge, oppressive structures of concrete, sparsely populated and the purpose of many parts already forgotten. This works extremely well for atmosphere, but yeah, the large empty stretches can feel a little tedious.

I don't mind it too much here because your movement speed is decent enough to traverse the empty stretches relatively quickly, but it can easily put off people who don't have a hardon for megastructures. The real gameplay issue of the levels is not the size itself, but the scale: everything is just a little oversized for regular humans. The same level size but with more content density, or more buildings which are just a little smaller rather than few buildings which are fuckhueg, would feel less imposing.

EDIT:
v1c70r14 check out Bleak Faith: Forsaken
It's mega jank (made by 3 people from Montenegro, surprised they managed to create an entire game in between their traditional 20 hour sleeping sessions) but it does capture the BLAME! vibe quite well. Not perfectly, of course, but closer than anything else I played so far.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

The game that perfectly captures Blame! and other media in the same vein still hasn't been made

Not a walking sim, just something that put all emphasis on navigating the world, with some sort of gameplay challenge at the end of it being the goal.

I've never played a game that lets you slide downhill on the slope of some gigantic concrete or steel pyramid in a game all about making the player feel small inside a much larger space, surfaces that extend for miles into unknown distant constructs equally as gargantuan in a desolate tomb world populated with sparse tribes of human survivors and rotting aeon old cyborgs.

This is probably literally what you are looking for: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1417930/Lorns_Lure/

Great post btw.

 

[Abu Antar]

I don't mind huge empty spaces per se. Shadow of the Colossus was great.

There's just something about this game that feels off.

In this case, it just feels like my time is wasted, but one thing you said stands out: It's about everything feeling like it was made for giants. Sometimes it works, other times, not so much.

 

[Jenkem]

it's pshek transcore what were you people expecting?