Transience is a game that released earlier this month, developed by YouTube shooter enthusiast Bigfry and a small team over the past few years. It’s a single-player stealth shooter with a noirish story and a cyberpunk setting…

…and I’ve put 400-odd hours into Mankind Divided including an embarrassing amount of time trying for a perfect stealth run of Golem, so of course I was interested.

I played the alpha demo when it came out a couple years ago, The writing and level design were absent, because it was a very small demo meant to give a taste of the movement, gunplay, and aesthetics, none of which turned me off.

So I bought it at launch (with a bundle discount for already owning Intravenous 2)… but I waited for a day one patch, because Bigfry was already trying to calibrate players’ expectations about how polished it would be, and I wanted to play the thing in its best state.

There was, indeed, a day one patch. And a day two patch, and a day three patch, and a total of six patches in the first week. (And a seventh, after I started playing.)

Reading through the patch notes, I’m glad I waited as long as I did, because a lot of that shit would have been ultra-refined, extra-volatile rage fuel. I’m talking about things like “player collision with grass” (weren’t we just laughing at Earth 2’s “game” demo for this?). And enemies sometimes being able to see you through the floor, or at ridiculous distances in the dark. And getting stuck on shelves or static decorations. And “the sleep dart takes 45 seconds to recharge, the knife also has some kind of charge mechanic, and you don’t have a silencer yet. Happy stealthing!”

(I saw a few “alpha testers” in the credits, but goddamn does it sound like this game needed a closed beta.)

Anyway, I eventually started playing and got used to the movement controls and visuals while being introduced to the protagonist, Eli Reed AKA “Talon,” an “Accountant” (contract killer) in the cyberpunk near future. Eli’s headed home one night when he hears the sound of gunfire from his apartment building; when he enters, he finds that most of his neighbors have been gunned down by corporate soldiers, and (via TVs) that the local gangers providing building “security” will also shoot on sight. And at this point he’s armed with nothing but his private-eye monologue and an instinctive visibility meter.

Therefore, stealth. Later, you’ll get a silenced pistol, a knife, and some sleep darts for stealth takedowns, and soon enough you’ll have a SMG to give you a non-zero chance of surviving an actual brief firefight. You still don’t have a good chance in a fight, because you can die in a quarter of a second, but you’re making progress.

(You can also find a shotgun, but don’t bother; it makes 2077’s Carnage seem almost worthwhile.)

At time of writing I’m at the end of mission 4, which is probably enough for a solid opinion on the thing.

Pros:

• I mostly get along with the gunplay, now that I’ve started pretending the shotgun doesn’t exist.
• While the enemies can be idiots at times, on the whole they’re at least somewhat unpredictable and therefore a decent stealth challenge. Even their pre-alert patrol patterns have caught me off guard a couple of times.
• The aesthetic is right up my alley.
• There’s one vehicle model that looks like a dune buggy fucked a mnster truck, and that just amuses me.

Cons and nitpicks:

• It takes until most of the way through mission 3 before you can last more than a fraction of a second in a gunfight.
• It also takes that long for you to get a sound meter to go with that visibility meter, and you won’t care. The sound meter does no detectable good when you have it, if you already know the Stealth 101 of “moving fast and using noisy weapons attracts attention.” And it makes no narrative sense to have one but not the other.
• The visibility meter is arguably necessary, because the chem lights and the like that the game uses to highlight loot don’t count as light sources as far as the stealth system is concerned.
• I wouldn’t at all mind a third gun slot. The game advertises 13 base guns and has three ammo types; why can Eli only use two of those at a time? Is it to preserve mobility, the ability to dodge, mentle, and jump more than two feet that he already doesn’t have? Or is it to nudge players toward using whatever guns are dropped or stashed in each mission area?
• The menu could use a few quality-of-life tweaks, like auto-highlighting “Continue” rather than “New Game” when there’s a saved game available and giving some hint as to which button gets you out of the credits.
• There’s a point at the end of mission 2 where you have to run past a couple of enemies and jump off the roof. If you don’t – if, say, you hang back and see if you can pick them off like you’ve been doing for two missions at that point – an invisible, impossible sniper or something will one-shot you. If the devs wanted that badly to force a “dash past the bad guys to the edge of the roof” moment, they should have made it a cutscene.
• I spotted a lot of lights bleeding through to the wrong side of walls and partitions, especially on mission 1.
• I also found a piece of wacky level geometry iin mission 1, the hard way. Good thing the autosave points aren’t too far apart…

Still undetermined:

• The writing. I want to know if there’s some defensible reason that Eli normally strolls around unarmed through regularly scheduled gang wars, and why he goes on and on and on and on and on about the metaphorical river of life. And the dialogue can be hit or miss.
• The plot. I probably won’t be able to judge it fully until closer to the end.

Overall, the cons are mostly minor, the gameplay is enjoyable, and the price is reasonable. I’m going to go ahead and recommend Transience to stealth-action and cyberpunk fans.