The Persistence looks like Dead Space in VR
Every time you die, the layout of the ship changes.
Imagine Dead Space in VR. That's what The Persistence is going for.
The Persistence is a first-person stealth horror game due out exclusively for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR this year.
It's set in the year 2521 on a deep space science vessel called The Persistence. As you'd expect, things are not quite right on the ship, with an incident mutating many of the crew. You have to stay alive to escape.
The hook is that The Persistence is procedurally generated. Every time you die a new character is woken up from cryosleep by IRIS, the ship computer, and the layout of the ship changes. So, every life plays out differently, with different enemies to fight, items to find and power-ups to collect.
On the VR side of things, survival requires you to be stealthy, so you'll spend a lot of time leaning around or peeking from behind cover.
There's some VR-fuelled couch co-op, too. Your friends can help by using their phone or tablet to hack into the ship computer. From there they can control doors, distract enemies and disable traps, among other things. But this second player can get rewarded if you die, which I'm sure will lead to some japes.
The Persistence is from Liverpool-based studio, Firesprite, which rose from the ashes of Sony Studio Liverpool to make the visuals for pre-loaded PS4 launch title The PlayRoom. Managing director Graeme Ankers was previously the studio director of Sony Liverpool.