PlayStation VR horror-stealth exclusive The Persistence launches on July 24

Something has gone very wrong aboard The Persistence. After investigating a collapsing star, an experiment goes awry, mutating most of the wayward spaceship’s crew into hulking monstrosities. Only those crew members that were in cryo-sleep have been unaffected. And now the ships computer is waking those slumbering innocents up, one by one, and sending them into The Persistence to investigate. As one of these sleepy crew members, players should get ready to die. A lot.

Players are awakened from their slumber and set out into the malfunctioning vessel in search of answers to the many questions revolving around the listing ship. The Persistence is procedurally generated, so each trip into the bowels of the ship plays out differently than the ones before. The nice part is, some of the weapons, money and power-ups that you earn in one life will carry over into the next. When you are killed, you wake up in a resuscitation chamber with some of your stuff intact. Through this dynamic, subsequent runs become a little more manageable.

I tried The Persistence when a rather large chunk of it was released on the PlayStation VR Demo Disc 2.0 late last year. I really enjoyed the refined control scheme, which allowed for teleportation while still enabling the Duel Shock thumb-sticks for fine-tuning your position. This combination of control styles allows for some precision stealth gameplay, which works really well when creeping around the corridors of The Persistence.

The visuals and sound in The Persistence are top notch, pushing Sony’s VR hardware to deliver some pretty high-end effects. The ship (and the monsters aboard it) is depicted with a high level of realism, and tip-toeing through its interiors can be heart-stopping. If you are at all interested in rogue-like horror games, The Persistence is well worth a look.

The Persistence releases on July 24 for $29.99, and can be pre-ordered here. Folks that pre-order get access to a number of Persistence-themed avatars, which is kinda fun.