Games worth discovering

I have never played a horror RPG like this before - Depersonalization Quick Review

16K View2022-12-23

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Depersonalization absolutely deserves to be played, but you may want to wait until the game is out of early access, which is expected to be around a year from now. Depersonalization is truly one of the strangest and most fascinating games I’ve played this year. It blends pen-and-paper RPG mechanics, anime aesthetics, the Lovecraft mythos, and Chinese philosophy all into a singular package. And that package may have some serious scuffs, but it’s still frankly incredible to behold.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve spent five hours learning the ropes of Depersonalization. In that time, I finished the game’s prologue scenario (including hitting multiple bad ends), thoroughly explored the hub area where I hung out between main missions, created several characters, and got started on one of the three scenarios that opens up after the prologue.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Real role-playing. Depersonalization has more in common with Disco Elysium than Final Fantasy. Taking heavy inspiration from the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, Depersonalization focuses heavily on investigating strange scenarios, gathering clues, and rolling dice for skill checks regularly. These decisions really grounded me in this bizarre world and made me feel like each choice I made had proper weight.

• Combat is downplayed. In keeping with the previous bullet point, Depersonalization never felt like I was just walking from combat encounter to combat encounter with cutscenes or limited exploration in-between. In fact, almost every fight in the prologue could be skipped through hiding or running away. The only required fight challenged me, but in a way that played out more like putting together a puzzle as opposed to wishing I could have grinded to get my stats higher. It’s still refreshing to play an RPG where fighting isn’t the focus.

• Hardcore horror credentials. Depersonalization makes regular nods to all sorts of unsettling horror genre inspirations, from Stephen King to creepypasta to the SCP Foundation collaborative writing project. That’s on top of the game’s plot being very openly built on a foundation built by H.P. Lovecraft. With every new reference and fresh take on a twisted classic that I discovered, I could just feel how much the creators of this game adore horror and its history.

• Incredible scope. The first few hours of Depersonalization were filled with me gasping in surprise every time the game peeled back a layer and revealed how much bigger it was than I had first imagined. That lasted right up through the end of the prologue, where the game finally takes you to its hub and shows the true, cosmic scope of its adventure. I won’t spoil the surprise here, but I’ll just say that even the fact that the game has a character creator is saved until hours into the experience, and there’s a narrative reason for it all.

• Ambitious player-created content dreams. Though it’s not implemented in the game yet, Depersonalization’s developers plan to add full Steam workshop support and even have a place in the hub area set up for it already. This will allow players to build their own scenarios, acting as the virtual gamemaster for anyone who wants to download them. Time will tell how robust and easy-to-use the player creation tools are, and whether the game is able to draw in an audience of eager amateur devs, but it’s enticing in theory at least.

WHAT SUCKS

• Translation and localization. While I was pulled in by the overall story in Depersonalization, the dialogue and narration is rough. The game’s script could clearly use a lot of cleaning up, and I really hope that happens, because I think the story that’s hidden under all of the awkward phrasing and broken English is actually extremely compelling. If the developers at MeowNature are reading this and need someone to edit their English translation, hit me up!

• Randomness. While rolling dice for skills checks is a core part of pen-and-paper role-playing, I can also see a lot of gamers getting annoyed with the randomness inherent in this process and how much it can affect what’s happening. Depersonalization lets you re-roll skill checks by spending a limited currency called Luck, and the game makes it relatively easy to save-scum if you really can’t handle the bad outcomes. But then again, part of the joy and chaos of this type of role-playing game is learning to roll with the punches of whatever hand you’re dealt by the RNG gods.

💬 Are you planning to play Depersonalization or skip it? And if you’re playing it, will you be checking it out right away or waiting for early access to finish? Let me know below!

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