Peripeteia was recommended to me recently by Steam, and is described therein as a cyberpunk immersive sim. I’ve been known to enjoy those. A lot. And it has a demo, which I tried out. These were my impressions, mostly in chronological order:

I like the atmosphere. It’s dark, it’s raining, it’s dystopian, and it feels like there’s a lot for a video game protagonist to engage with. Some parts of the UI are a bit goofier, with Fallout-like cartoon icons, but maybe that fits the character, I don’t know yet. That certainly isn’t the default UI for a military cyborg…

(Of course the protagonist is a cyborg; that’s practically a genre requirement at this point. I don’t mind that if it’s at all supported by the writing, though, and it gives more gameplay options.)

And the compass quickly started to piss me off. It swings around to slowly point in the right direction over a few seconds, like a pocket compass would do IRL, and thus like no other video-game compass I’ve ever seen. I’d prefer it to be readable at a glance, not readable after staring at it for a second or two to make sure.

Anyway, on to the actual game. I woke up after having been dumped in a pit in a ruined old building of some kind, with a big ol’ hammer and sickle icon on the ceiling. And the first challenge, after reading the notebook nearby, was to get out of the pit.

• There’s a ladder I can’t quite reach, but I can climb up behind it… no, I can’t climb around from the back to the front, and I can’t quite manage to jump and twist around quickly enough.

• There was a crate I could move under the ladder… no, the jump is still just a few inches too far.

• Wait, the notebook mentioned my implants, what are they? How do I access them? (check controls) Oh, I have some sort of mobility augmentation, does that let me jump higher? Yes, it does. …wait, the control for climbing ladders is a series of small jumps upward? Ugh.

(For the creator of one of the videos I link to below, only the jump-and-twist method worked. He explicitly called this out as a checkpoint to test your tolerance for gameplay jank…)

Next obstacle: open a door by clicking the “use” key on a nearby… thingy. On examination, it turns out to be a giant keyboard the size of a desk. For a door. OK, I’ll roll with it…

…and standing on the other side is the scavenger who wrote that notebook inventorying my augs, and now he’s disappointed that I’m still alive. Is this the melee combat tutorial? Because I’d really like to punch his head clean off.

…no, after he gets through whining about not being able to sell parts of my corpse, he becomes my first quest giver.

(The last video-game aug scavenger I got along even a little bit with was Tong Si Hung from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and he had some charisma and some info I’d sought him out for. And even he turned on me in the end, with that trick detonator. As for Filemon here, he can go fuck an electric pencil sharpener.)

More UI shenanigans: this game’s version of inventory Tetris will probably get interesting, with inventory shapes this odd. Whether it’ll be “interesting” in a good or bad way, I can’t tell yet.

…OK, I guess I’l be playing in first person as much as possible, because the first-person animations might be slightly jank, but the third-person animations are hyperjank.

The next objective is the dome past the pool garden. I can’t see a dome, or a pool garden, so I guess I’m exploring the level… and Fuckhead back there advised me to avoid the Metro, so sure, I’ll climb this GODDAMNED INTERMINABLE STAIRWELL.

I’m not sure yet whether this is “exploring” the level, conveying an artistic sense of immensity, or just filling space.

…oh, that’s the pool garden. It’s a small, raised-bed garden built inside an old swimming pool. Solid worldbuilding there. I still can’t see a dome, though… and now I’m apparently soft-locked in conversation with the gardener. Shit. How do I exit conversations? No dialogue option seems to get me out of it – I’ve looped through at least some of them twice – and I’ve clicked all over the page. I can’t even ESC to the in-game menu.

So I alt-tabbed out and restarted from the beginning, because I hadn’t quicksaved and I don’t even know if this game has autosaves.

So it’s an immersive sim where I’ll be quicksaving before talking to any NPC, I guess, or avoiding talking to them at all.

I eventually found a ladder leading up the side of a pipe, the way forward…. to my real problem with this game.

After about an hour of play, I’ve been given a gun of my choice by the disappointed scav-scum and found an old cavalry saber (pinning a corpse to a wall halfway up a damaged building, WTF), but there has been no combat. The demo is all level exploration and traversal. The level exploration is good – y’know, immersive – though after a while I found myself nitpicking instances of iffy lighting…

(No, that flight of stairs doesn’t end a third of the way up. Yes, that stairwell was long enough for me to take two notable screenshots.)

The traversal, though…

Jumping puzzles like these are more tolerable in games with less sloppy jumping controls. And a lot of these jumps would send me plummeting off the side of a skyscraper to my instant death.

On reflection it reminded me of Deus Ex, and not in a pleasant way. Remember New York, and the mission with the NSF generator? If you go over the roofs, there’s one possible route where you jump down a half-broken fire escape. The controls aren’t really up to that, and it’s easy to fall fatally. It’s over quickly, though – mere seconds, if it isn’t your first time. I tend to find myself using it; I prefer the rooftop route, even if I don’t prefer that specific jump, and like I said, the bad part is over in seconds and I can get back to sneaking up on NSF troopers.

Imagine that fire-escape bit filling up half the game, and you have Peripeteia.

I didn’t get as far as the next objective before quitting to watch a couple of related videos:

• Oh, it IS mostly jumping puzzles throughout.

• Oh, character progression is also busted. And your inventory disappears between levels, so maybe don’t bother gearing up or saving money.

Greeeeeeat.

The Steam page says Peripeteia will be in early access until (“we hope”) early 2026. I’ve wishlisted it, so I’m notified when and if it comes out of early access and I can check out any changes, because I want to like this game. I can’t recommend it, though, in its current state.