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Still in Early Access, but the concept looks neat | Depersonalization - First Impressions

3K View2022-12-21

At face value, Depersonalization’s aesthetic and general feeling unquestionably reminded me of the many anime visual novel games I’ve played before: the chilling soundtrack, the eerie anime art, the intriguing story elements, and the various choices you are presented in the game.

Anime-wise, the art style is a mix of gothic, medieval, and noir, with heavy use of lovecraftian elements. However, behind all that impressive eye-candy is a game that is indeed an example of a true Early Access game, If i’m judging by its heavily unfinished state.

Depersonalization is a new anime-style tactical RPG recently released in Early Access today, and at its heart is it's interesting story intertwined with its promising gameplay, both of which are immediately noticeably to be in the early stages of the development.

The gameplay is simple enough, if you’re familiar with the Call of Cthulhu RPG series of books, then it's something similar. Depersonalization focuses on skill-checks that affect the outcome of the dice rolls - Success or Fail - which happens at almost every action that you do; Talking to people, checking out objects, even the turn-based combat is highly dependent on the dice-rolls.

With focus on character development, evolving choices, and dice rolls, Depersonalization is truly a dynamic game that will make the experience fresh and exciting at every playthrough, and it's designed that way. Even the story is designed to go into multiple paths depending on your stats and roll outcomes. As of now though, the story is currently splintered into different story modules. In which more modules are planned in the future, as well as also letting players make their own and share it via the Steam Workshop.

There is an expansive dialogue already in-game, but its english localization is wonky with google translate levels of quality apparent in every line of dialogue. There’s voice-acting for the characters, but they’re all software generated and mainly robotic sounding. Still, it's commendable to include voice acting despite its current state, with every character getting their own distinct AI voice to differentiate them from each other.

I’m sure there is a deep story underneath all that language barrier and AI voice-acted dialogue, but at its current state, I cannot recommend a proper enjoyment of the story. Along with the dice roll focused gameplay, Depersonalization is more like a proof of concept for now that honestly seems really cool.

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