Peripeteia trailer
“I’d rather do something that’s an inch wide and a mile deep than something that’s a mile wide and an inch deep,” said Warren Spector (creator of Deus Ex) and pioneer of the “immersive sim” genre of games. From Dishonored to Hitman, a plethora of games following this design philosophy of detail and interactivity over scope have been made over the past two decades.
While the larger industry has left behind the immersive sim genre in recent years, immersive sim games have now become a cornerstone of indie games. One of the most unique immersive sims in recent memory came out of a humble 2021 Kickstarter project entitled Peripeteia which ended up raising over 37,000 euros.
Originally a Game Jam demo, Peripeteia has morphed into a promising successor to Deus Ex, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and other early-2000s immersive sims. It’s primarily being developed by two developers named Snaketicus and Shodanon who The Xavierite was fortunate enough to interview.
Shodanon is in love with immersive sim games, and he’s passionate about making them.
“There are games made by the numbers, as products, without passion, and every single immersive sim I’ve seen in the making is a work of art and passion.”
Shodanon got his start in the /agdg/ (ameteur game developer general) imageboard community. Describing his experience with the community, he said:
“It’s (/agdg/) the community that spawned games such as Umarangi Gen, Risk of Rain, Gunpoint, Unconventional Warfare, Project Wingman, Speebot, God is a Cube and many others more and less well known titles.
It’s a place where people motivate each other, make connections, share demos, experiences and advice. I’ve been a part of it since 2015 and have been sharing progress on numerous larger and smaller projects, including Game Jams, some of which are on my itch.io page.”
For an indie game made by a small team, Peripeteia is certainly an ambitious project. While some have pitched the game as “a Post-Soviet Punk immersive sim where you play as an anime cyborg lady stuck in an alternate version of Poland”, Shodanon went deeper in describing how the game fits into the loosely-defined genre.
“Immersive sims give players open-ended goals and varied means of achieving them, without hindering players with an explicit intended way to play or excessive hand holding. They generally reward players that think out of the box.
It’s a term coined at Looking Glass Studios in the 90s, popularized by Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, and Peripeteia hopes to live up to their legacy and philosophy of respecting the player.”
Shodanon also described the game’s premise, “The game starts with Marie stating her goal to “find a bunker” underneath the closed city the game takes place in.
The backstory of the world and its factions will be revealed as she visits new locations, looks for leads while performing assassinations, and other missions along the way. We do like keeping it vague, but we hope what we have in store will prove interesting.”
When it comes to the game’s mechanics, Shodanon expressed a desire to focus on perfecting the game’s core gameplay rather than adding extraneous features.
“We can’t overscope ourselves (more than we already do).”
Peripeteia’s primary appeal is the diversity of possible playstyles that players will be able to use to progress in the game. Shodanon went into more detail describing the game’s primary three playstyles: stealth, assault, and opportunist.
“Stealth is quite obvious, sneaking around and avoiding confrontation, completing your mission undetected and barely getting your hands dirty. Assault would be your brute force approach of killing everything in your way.
An opportunist is the sort of player that tries to play stealthily but won’t reload the game if things get hot, trying to resolve things the way that suits them at the time, or aligns with a certain faction’s sympathies. We don’t want to have a morality system that judges your actions, but the factions you’ll interact with will have a preference as to how they like things done and your playstyle will affect your standing with them.”
On top of this, Shodanon also promises “abstract and symbolic” cutscenes and “creepier stuff” to complement the game’s uneasy atmosphere.
Shodanon ended off by expressing gratitude to Peripeteia’s active following on Discord for helping turn the ambitious idea into a reality.
“It probably wouldn’t be possible without the community. Some of the cooler community ideas are so cool they get implemented on the same day, ingenious ‘why haven’t we thought of that’ stuff.
For example, the ability to shoot down the saber stuck in a wall if it’s unreachable. And some of the members have become our cherished friends, as much as one can be online.”
With an unique premise, active community, and passionate devs, it looks like there’s a bright future ahead for Peripeteia. While the game is still in development, its demo is free to download on itch.io, and the game is available to wishlist on Steam.
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