Video Game / The Persistence

The Persistence is a sci-fi horror rogue-like video game where you die over and over and need the titular virtue to finish the game.

You play as a futuristic astronaut whose spaceship has been rocked by a Negative Space Wedgie that killed the rest of the crew and caused the cloning devices on the ship to ceaselessly create an army of defective and violent clones. Thankfully, there's one functioning cloning device in Recovery that will clone your character whenever she dies, letting you gather weaponry, upgrade your clones' DNA, and slowly repair the ship so you can get back home.

In practice, the cloning thing just amounts to letting you respawn in the hub area when you die. You lose any weapons and equipment you have, but keep currency you need to buy more stuff and upgrade your character. Each time you die, the layout of the other four levels of the ship change, keeping it fresh even as you die and die and die.

As part of the eight generation of console gaming, the game is playable on the Xbox One and PS4 and their immediate successors. It also supports VR gameplay.

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The Persistence provides examples of the following tropes:

• Abandoned Laboratory: The Persistence is littered with wrecked rooms filled with medical supplies, holographic displays of unknown data, and samples of alien crystals all left half-studied before the crew was slain.
• Action Bomb: One of many enemies that will find Zimri on her journey is an invisible variant of the standard mook who will burst into flames upon seeing her and explode the first chance it gets. While it does do a lot of damage to you, it also does damage to every enemy around it and you can easily block the explosion with a fully-charged shield.
• Airvent Passageway: There are lots of ground-level air vents just small enough for Zimri to crouch through throughout your perilous journey. The grates even have retinal scanners that let you open them effortlessly, and most of them have some money in them!
• Almost Out of Oxygen:
  • Certain loot chests can only be opened after running through a damaged portion of the ship that's had all its oxygen sucked out. You'll take continuous damage until you get past the door to where the chest is, which is always conveniently secure.
  • The mandatory section of the third floor requires you to go through a part of the ship with a gaping hole that opens up into the void of space. Like the chest rooms, you'll have to be quick running through before the damage from suffocation gives you a game over.
• Ammunition Conservation: Each weapon only comes with enough ammunition for a handful of uses and since enemies don't drop ammo, you got to try your best to save your ammo for when it will be most useful.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Dark matter is used as fuel for every futuristic or paranormal element in the story: faster-than-light travel, teleportation, x-ray vision, you name it.
• Artificial Intelligence: The objective for the game's first level is to restart The Persistence's AI, IRIS, to plot a course to get the ship back to Earth.
• Artificial Stupidity: Enemies are easily led into exploding traps, even after all their friends were killed the same way. They also will always run straight towards you and bludgeon you even when they have ranged attacks.
• Artificial Zombie: The game's enemies may be the result of flesh tissue printers gone wrong, but they still are shambling, corpse-like monsters with all the friendliness of a Romero-movie zombie.
• Asymmetric Multiplayer: The VR version has a companion app which allows another player to manipulate the area around the main player. They can help you out by closing doors on enemies or luring them away, but they can also lure them towards you, trap you in with them, or do something as petty as turn the lights off. They can unlock more control by either helping or hurting you, at their preference.
• Aura Vision: You can channel dark matter to briefly see the auras of enemies and hazards through any walls or objects in your sight.
• Back Stab: Sneaking behind enemies and hitting them with your Harvester's dart in the nape of their neck will suck out more stem cells than you'd get from a normal attack, as well as doing enough damage to one-shot the grunts on the first floor.
• Beehive Barrier: Your dark matter force field takes the form of a bunch of blue hexagons that fade and fizzle out when an enemy breaks it.
• Booby Trap: Every so often, one of the cabinets that hold health, weapons, and currency will have a bomb in them that will glow red and blow your face off if you stand there agape.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Activating The Persistence's Stardrive is only possible for the ship's dead captain. Your final goal in the game then is to steal her DNA, clone her, and occupy her body to trick the ship into thinking you're the captain.
• Brain Uploading: Each member of the crew has a copy of their mind somehow uploading into the ship's computer, which is programmed to immediately create a clone for them to possess as soon as they die. The problem is that when the ship was damaged, all but two of the crew's back-ups - security officer Zimri Eder and engineer Serena Karim - were destroyed, so the ship has been printing out copies of the dead crew members non-stop with no personality back-up to speak of, leaving them mindless monsters.
• Bio-Augmentation: The second core of your progression (besides armor) is gene-editing so you and all future clones you possess are better at the fundamentals of the game. Your stealth, melee power, and dark matter abilities are all improved by using this gene-editing.
• Body Backup Drive: The Persistence has cloning printers on each deck ready to create a clone of any crew member who dies so their consciousness can be uploaded into them. This is the game's excuse for why you can respawn after you die, plus you can also upload your character's consciousness into clones of your fellow crewmates if you so choose.
• Bottomless Magazines: There are a few areas mandatory to complete the story where you'll get a weapon with unlimited ammo. On deck 2, you'll get a Valkyrie gun with unlimited needles and on Deck 3, you'll get a Gravihook you can use to throw enemies around forever. Both suddenly have finite ammo once you clear the story mission.
• Burning with Anger: Furious Berserkers have the unique ability to burst into flame whenever they get hurt, causing to do much more damage when they bring their wrath upon you.
• Clone Degeneration: Every clone printer linked to the auxillary - which is to say, every printer except the one in Recovery - has gone haywire and started printing aberrant and murderous clones of the crew non-stop. Some lack eyes, some are abnormally large, and some weep loudly enough to cause physical harm, but all of them lack any of the intelligence or compassion of the crew they're cloned from.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game uses pretty standard tiers for the upgrades you can get and the armor designs you can find. The best is the epic tier, which is colored gold.
• Continuing is Painful: Dying causes you to lose every single gun, grenade, melee weapon, and gadget you've collected on this life and sends you right back to spawn. The layout of the game resets and with that, every enemy you killed respawns.
• Cooldown: Item Fabricators can be used once and then take a couple of minutes before they can be used again. This prevents you from making a full arsenal in a room full of enemies alerted to your presence with no consequences.
• Corralling Vacuum: Like many other variants of this trope, there's a grenade that summons a small black hole that suck enemies into it. The sucking isn't the important part of the weapon, though, as it also does massive damage.
• Counter-Attack: Activating the shield just as an enemy is going to strike you will knock them back and expose their back to you. If you're quick, you can strike them in the back of the head for bonus damage on par with a Back Stab.
• Cowardly Mooks: One of the enemies you'll find is a Gollum-looking hunchback who hides behind cover and ambushes you. After trying to hit you once, it will run away and try to hide again.
• Critical Existence Failure: No amount of bullets, fire, or psychic screams will slow Zimri down or break her striking arm unless they kill her dead.
• Deflector Shield: The Persistence has four generators that should project a massive energy shield across the ship's hull. You can reactivate them throughout the game and even use them to boost your personal force field for the rest of your current life.
• Devious Daggers: The creepy little hunchbacks who fight you by sneaking up behind you and run away whenever you try to fight back wield tiny daggers. This demonstrates both their intelligence in using tools and their sinister nature, preferring to back-stab you then take you in a straight fight.
• Dialog During Gameplay: Instead of telling the story through cutscenes, dialogue will play between your player character and the game's one NPC when you progress to key parts of the ship. You'll also get unique dialogue when you respawn or pick up an particular item for the first time in a life.
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: Just like the rest of the crew, you and your one ally have corpses of their original bodies placed somewhere around the ship for you to discover. Zimri's body doesn't do anything, other than the basic task of serving as her cloning template, but sucking the stem cells from your friend's body lets you clone them and use their statistics.
• Drone Deployer: The Swarm Grenade explodes into a dozen flying robots that shoot lasers at your enemies for half a minute or so. It takes most of that duration to kill anything and lot less time to distract something enough for you to kill it.
• Early Game Hell: Expect to die a lot early on from deadly enemies who you can't afford to waste ammunition from your weak weapons to kill them. That's if you can risk buying weapons at all, since you lose them every time you die, so you can spend all your money to go all in and have to start your arsenal from scratch. Once you have upgrades, access to more money from later levels, and better bodies, the game becomes much, much easier.
• Equipment Upgrade: You can spend Fabchips to upgrade equipment (up to three times), but doing so uses the same currency you need to buy new equipment after each death. So while you can invest your currency into upgrades, doing so will mean going for a while under-equipped and risk a reset.
• Exploding Barrels: Classic big, red, explosive barrels can be found in the game for you to shoot or launch at enemies with the Gravity Hook.
• Golden Ending: There's an ending where Zimri and Serena both survive, but it requires you to complete one last gauntlet to upload them to the auxiliary databanks, which necessitates going through huge waves of enemies without dying once.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Enemies will quickly stop looking for you as soon as you leave their sight, even if you've shot them and five other monsters who now lay dead.
• Heal Thyself: Zimri can instantly restore her hit points just by grabbing med-kits with no need to spend time stitching, cleaning, or disinfecting her wounds.
• Hub Level: The Recovery deck is where you respawn each time you die. From there, you can buy permanent upgrades and non-consumable equipment like armor and Harvester tools before teleporting to one of the levels you have unlocked.
• Human Resources: How are you meant to restart the energy-depleted Stardrive? Why, throw the angry corpses of a bunch of clones right into the engine and burn 'em for fuel!
• Hyperspace Arsenal: You can have one copy of every weapon and gadget in the game on your person at a time. So you can have about a dozen grenades, four guns, seven weird sci-fi gadgets, a riot baton, a knife, and an electric lance that's as long as your body all on your person without being weighed down.
• Implacable Man: The Blood Hound is an enemy who wanders from room to room on a deck hunting you down. It has by far the most health of any enemy and doesn't flinch upon being hit or shot in the head.
• Invisibility Cloak: The invisibility gadget will make you invisible and generally undetectable by most enemies for the short time. Just tread lightly around Listeners, obviously.
• Item Crafting: Each floor has randomly placed modules that you can use to craft different types of consumable equipment and weaponry. You got your grenade module, your gun module, your melee weapon module, and your module of miscellaneous items. Be careful, though, the module shuts off for a time after you use it and you can't keep any equipment when you die, so you have to be smart about what you craft and when you craft it.
• Justified Extra Lives: Each time you respawn, a new clone body is being created with your memories implanted into it. Your character will comment on your prior death and your Voice with an Internet Connection will try to reassure you. You can even pick different bodies to clone with different attributes, which your ally will also comment on.
• Justified Tutorial: The game starts with Zimri disoriented in a new body, so there's a good reason for Serena to ask her if she can still look around and control her movement properly.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: The final area offers you a choice to save either yourself or the voice helping you throughout the game. Whoever you choose will narrate the ending, and the other one will only be okay if you complete the final area without dying.
• Life Meter: The second white bar in the left-hand corner of the screen measures Zimri's hit points. If you get hit, it goes down and if it fully depletes, you die. You can raise the health bar by grabbing med-kits.
• Limp and Livid: Weepers stand limp with their heads resting on their shoulder. Yet they are not restful, for at the mere sight of they you, they will let out a scream so terrible that it will paralyze you and may even kill you from its sheer malice.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: One of the many ways to die is to have Weepers cry at you with such intensity that you're paralyzed in fear and die on the spot. Your vision even turns blood-red so long as you can hear them.
• Make Some Noise: Siren Grenades manipulate sound to fool enemies into thinking they are a vulnerable bit of prey hiding out. Instead, once enemies enter proximity, they explode in a thunderous burst of noise.
• Mana Meter: The "dark matter" meter depletes the more you use paranormal abilities. If it runs out, you can't teleport or see through walls until it fills back up.
• Mecha-Mook: The only enemy in the game that isn't a defective clone is the attack drone. It's a floating robot that remains stationary and whittles your health down with a barrage of bullets.
• Mission Control: Serena serves as the voice in your ear throughout the game informing you what mission you need to go on to get the ship running again.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: There are no unique boss enemies in the game. Instead, the game marks the end of each deck with a unique room that get flooded with enemies.
• Mr. Exposition: Most of Serena's dialogue is spent explaining stuff. You get a new item, she explains it. You're on a new deck of the ship, she explains it. You die, she explains why you aren't staring at the Pearly Gates.
• Multi-Mook Melee:
  • Zimri has to fight massive waves of enemy to progress past Decks 1, 2, and 4 in lieu of a boss fight. Decks 1 and 2 are merciful enough to give her weapons with infinite ammo, but deck 4, being the final deck, forces you to fight the biggest mass of monsters yet with only the finite equipment you've scavenged from the wreck of the ship.
  • Certain loot chests are surrounded by defective clone printers that continuously spawn mad engineers until they run out of power. You'll have to kill all the engineers and the occasional Berserker before you can open the chest and reap your rewards.
• Negative Space Wedgie: A "spark gap" on a singularity jump knocked the Persistence off course and into the orbit of a massive black hole, causing its systems to go haywire. This includes erasing almost all the crew engrams, creating a whole bunch of monsters from the auxiliary printers, and causing the macrostructure configurator to malfunction.
• One-Hit Kill: The Peacekeeper knife is a melee weapon which can kill any enemy besides a Bloodhound with a single stab.
• One Hit Poly Kill: The Valkyrie gun can shoot a needle powerful enough to pierce through an enemy's skin, into another, instantly kill them both, and pin them to a wall.
• Optional Stealth: Nothing in the game requires you to sneak around, so if you just want to go around smacking ten-foot tall hulks and gunning down defective robots, more power to you. Just get used to the Game Over screen.
• Our Clones Are Different: The titular spaceship has cloning devices all over the place that automatically clone any crew member who dies and transfers their memories to that clone. This is how the game justifies your Video-Game Lives and the ability of your enemies (who come from malfunctioning cloning devices) to respawn.
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: The game gives no clue as to how dark matter can let you apparate from place to place or see heat signatures, but it sounds mysterious enough for it to maintain your Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
• Our Doors Are Different: All doors in the game are suitably science-fictional, either being totally automatic or automatic to those accepted by their retinal scanner. You only need to physically move malfunctioning doors that can randomly close in your face.
• Patrolling Mook: Blood Hounds are the only enemy who will open doors and enter different rooms. If it sees or hears you, closing the doors behind you won't stop it from coming after you.
• Pinned to the Wall: The Valkyrie fires a massive dart powerful enough to lift human-sized enemies off their feet, across a room, and impale throw them and into whatever wall they hit.
• Point of No Return: Engaging the stardrive causes a power surge than knocks out several key systems... including the Recovery clone printer, the only properly functioning printer there was on the ship. From here, you either back up both Zimri ''and'' Serena's engrams to the auxiliary or die, with the only survivor being the backed up engram.
• Poison Mushroom: Some cabinets look just like the ones that heal you or give you new weapons, only for their retinal scanner to turn blood-red and explode in your face.
• Powered by a Black Hole: The Persistence's engine runs off the gravitational energy created by a singularity. The same energy is used in a much smaller form to power your Gravity Grenades.
• Power Nullifier: Being within about five feet of a Blood Hound will shut down your Dark Matter abilities.
• Regenerating Mana: Your Dark Matter meter refills every couple of seconds so you can teleport around often. Plus, there are armors you can wear that increases the meter's regeneration.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The most powerful gun in the game is a revolver named Stormfury balanced by its limited ammunition. It starts out only holding six bullets and can be upgraded to hold nine, less than the minimum for Valkyrie. Still, it can one-shot giant, bulky enemies like Berserkers with ease.
• Robbing the Dead: The closest thing the game has to a collectible is the DNA of your co-workers, which you have to suck right out of their dead bodies. They also tend to to have some nice gear by them you can loot, but the main thing to take is the sweet, sweet, nucleic acid you can suck straight of their skulls.
• Roguelike: Every time you go to a new deck, the layout of that deck will be randomized, along with the loot and the enemies. It is debated if this is because of a malfunction or the black hole, but either way, the ship's macrostructure configurator has been on the fritz since the spark gap.
• Sense-Impaired Monster: The Listeners can only find you by listening, so you can sit right in front of them and have no fear of being seen. Just don't move, shoot, use an item, open a door, or wet yourself too loudly or they'll gun you down.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: The Ivy Serum forces any enemy you inject with it to become your ally for a sizable duration and attack any enemies in their sight.
• Shock Stick:
  • The final upgrade for the humble Riot Baton causes it to shock enemies in place for each hit.
  • Blood Hounds wield massive lances that continuously shoot off bolts of purple lightning. You can kill them and take the lance for your own uses to electrocute enemies to death.
• Smash Mook: Berserkers are just big dumb brutes that do little more than flail their arms around you, but man are they good at it.
• Space Isolation Horror: You're forced to wander alone on the quiet decks of The Persistence comforted only by the ambient groans of the dying shuttle and the company of murderous aberrations who will sneak behind you and beat you to death.
• Stationary Enemy: Drones never actually move, they just float in place and wait for you to pop your out before gunning you down.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Take note whenever you find a computer console overflowing with med-kits. Such kindness generally means the room next to you has a chest that you'll have to risk suffocation or murder to open.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Weepers can't be damaged because of their ability to teleport whenever anyone or anything comes close to them. If they didn't throw around deadly cries at you, they wouldn't be vulnerable enough to be beaten to death.
• Take Your Time: Serena may implore you to get them home as soon as possible, but you can spend days wandering the decks grinding Fab Chips and Stem Cells to unlock all the equipment upgrades and get every trophy without a worry of running out of resources or Serena mutinying against you to try to escape herself.
• Techno Wreckage: Play The Persistence if you love the sight of derelict spaceships filled with scattered wiring and misplaced floorboards!
• Telefrag: The Reaper weapon lets you weaponize your teleportation by appearing right where an enemy is and reducing them to paste.
• Teleportation: One of your most basic abilities is teleporting a short distance in front of you. You can only do so so many times before your "Dark Matter" meter runs out. Since the game was designed with VR in mind, this was likely added as a way to allow players to move around without having to walk into walls all the time.
• Teleport Spam: The Weepers will teleport non-stop to catch you by surprise or avoid your attacks until they have to cooldown after their cry attacks. Then you actually have some time to strike before they teleport away.
• Throw the Mook at Them: The Gravihook lets you pick up enemies and launch them at others.
• Time Stands Still: The time warp gadget you can craft stops time for a relatively short amount of time.
• Trick Bomb: You can unlock and upgrade a variety of grenades with weird sci-fi effects like creating a swarm of robots or a black hole.
• Turns Red: Be careful fighting Berserkers, because if you hurt them enough, they'll engulf their fists in flame and do even more damage when they smash Zimri.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: You are stuck behind the eyes of a trapped and scared scientist all the way through your journey through The Persistence, until the very last cutscene.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Listen, the Gravity Grenade can do a lot of damage to your enemies, but it should also destroy the whole ship considering it creates a miniature black hole.
• Unstoppable Rage: How do you get super strength and invincibility in this horror sci-fi game? Why, take a drug that makes you makes you literally see red and express your fury through inhuman violence!
• The Voice: You never see Serena alive and well in the game. You only ever hear her voice and see her original corpse.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Serena helps you out by radioing in information and interfacing with the ship to activate whatever mechanisms you need to manually restart the ship's systems.
• Where It All Began: The final level of the game is located in a locked portion of the tutorial and hub level, the Recovery deck.