THE PERSISTENCE
Don’t like it. Never tried it. Every month we force one of our team to play their most feared game
From the start it’s clear to me that this colony ship I’m on is primed for disaster. Exposed technical tools? Check. Replicator machines dumping out zombie-fied bodies? Unfortunately. And all this as the eponymous vessel has stalled in the shadow of a black hole. The voice speaking into my ear tells me I’m our only hope of survival, which would be okay if I weren’t such a PS VR horror wuss.
Anyway, off I go, a makeshift weapon called the Harvester in hand, creeping around the many randomly generated ship decks while scrounging for resources that I can hopefully develop into gadgets. It isn’t long, however, before I’m confronted with my first nightmarish duplication, a malformed clone chucked out by one of the malfunctioning replicators. Through the miracle of crouch I get a good angle on them, sucking stem cells from the back of their neck so they quickly fall to the ground. Suddenly I’m filled with a false sense of confidence.
My main objective is to get through this floor so I can switch the ship’s AI system back on, which I steadily do until the map tells me there’s a supply cache nearby. Great! Only when I reach it, ‘Uh-uh’, says The Persistence. Cut to me swiftly being trampled by the bodies of former crew members, topped off by a great hulking fellow who simply barrels into me. My three-second shield never stood a chance.
Luckily, death in The Persistence is all part of the process. So, in my shiny new body I take stock of upgrades and cheese my way across ship using invisibility grenades and a serum that lets foes fight on my behalf. This DeadSpace-meets-Rogue-Legacy shtick may do it for some, but the added immersion of VR is just too spine-chilling for me. AI switched on. I’m logging off…
I’M SWIFTLY TRAMPLED BY THE BODIES OF FORMER CREW MEMBERS.