Prepare to Perish
By Philip Orona
You’re dead. Then you wake up in a coffin and push your way out. Welcome to the afterlife, I hope you brought a friend. If you’re alone, that’s fine too, death doesn’t care. All you need is a weapon and some determination and if you die, that’s cool, just come on back and try to complete the rights of Orpheus to descend into the afterlife. Sound familiar? I hope so. Perish utilizes a template that some of the best roguelikes have used to build their narrative upon. From Hades to Dead Cells, Perish has more “I’ll be back” than an Arnold Schwarzenegger binge fest. The people at ITEM42 and Handy games have brought us this replay rogue remix with an interesting twist and what a twist! #MNightShyamalan
Perish takes the Roguelike genre and adds online co-op along with an FPS spin. At first Perish feels like Skyrim or a more forgiving Souls entry with its aesthetics and design combined with its gameplay view point. You can equip your avatar with weapons and items that give you passive effects that help you tear through the randomly generated hordes of creatures that will appear in the area for the randomly generated task you are to partake in. The quests you are given by the guiding deity range from withstanding an enemy rush, fighting a boss, finding an imprisoned soul and absorbing it, or hitting a set number of markers to accomplish a goal like building a ballista or a monolith within a given area. The areas also contain places to acquire temporary boosts or boons that grant verified effects like lighting strike on blocking, a damaging medusa stare or enhanced movement speed as a couple of examples. This too is a very Roguelike trope.
The game starts with your rebirthing catacomb and table/shrine/equipment store in Pantheon. In this hub area, you can stash money for buying items as you find them out in the field. Once you find something like a gun or ax while in a stage, you can purchase and equip it in the hub area for your next Elysium run. During your run, you will accumulate money as you kill creatures. If you die while out and about, you lose your cash. If you clear an area objective, you can return to the hub and bank your money. If you do that though, you have to start from the first dungeon all over again. This is the risk versus reward part of the game. Do you continue to the next area and unlock more (risking the money in hand) or do you go back, heal and bank your earnings but have to start again while also losing your temporary boons in the process?
As you accumulate better weapons and items, the enemies become more tolerable, making progression easier as time goes on. Blocking and using the throwing daggers becomes very vital in dispatching both enemy hordes and bosses. As you unlock the guns however in a multiplayer setting, the game becomes an FPS frag fest. With the maximum of 4 online players in a session, the number of enemies increases greatly. With projectile weapons in hand, the game starts to feel a little more like Call of Duty: Raiders of the lost tomb. The action becomes more fast and furious than the single player melee questing so, multiplayer is literally a game changer.
As you play through the action, the atmosphere really engulfs you with its music and color palate. The faded bronze on the metal pieces, golden glow from objectives and portals and the faded concrete give off the vibe of an ancient mystical underworld. The sound effects like lightning or strikes of weapons on shields sound and feel solid and shine when you step out into an open area that is raining blood. When a boss appears you get a heavy metal soundtrack while doing battle which gets the blood pumping. The entire presentation is done extremely well and really serves to make the game enjoyable whether it is on the big or little screen (Steam Deck).
As it all comes together, Perish is fun. While it is enjoyable in a solo campaign, it really needs to be experienced online. Much like Left 4 Dead, it’s a solid game play experience no doubt but with friends, there is much more to enjoy. Mixing up weapon loadouts and tactics for the various enemies and objectives between several players is the real meat here. Working together to achieve tasks harkens back to Call of Duty or even Payday to a lesser extent. The team effort to achieve the final death that the character is looking for after the endless loop of death and rebirth feels very satisfying.
Perish really does feel like a labor of love. The developers took some of the best roguelike game elements and crammed them into a multiplayer game that can either run like a Single serving “Souls” game or like an online Castle Wolfenstein session when joined by others. Perish is great fun and can consume hours of your time or you can play a run, put it down and pick it back up later quite easily. My only gripe is that there is no true game pause while in a solo session but as a game that is meant to be played online, it’s a small forgivable foible. The varied monster variety along with the different types of weapons to use in a looping dungeon alongside a few buddies makes Perish worth your time and money.
Things I like:
The atmosphere
Enemy variety
Online Co-op
The music
Things I would improve:
Slightly more randomized dungeon design
Perhaps a true pause function on solo play
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