Perseverance

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is no longer available on the Nintendo Switch eShop or Nintendo.com. However, it has since been replaced with Perseverance: Complete Edition. What follows is the review of the original release of the game.)

Perseverance is a Visual Novel telling the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse story. This game was released on PC as Perseverance: Part 1 in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch simply as Perseverance a year later.

The presentation here is okay, featuring hand-drawn visuals backed by occasional simple themes and sometimes sound effects. I found the artwork to be ugly but at least well-detailed, though the lack of better sound to go along with it is a bit perplexing.

However, beyond my personal distaste for the art style, this game has serious problems, and the first one is in its title – this is a game that is actively hiding from Nintendo Switch players that it is an incomplete product by removing the “Part 1” from the title. Let me be clear here, this isn’t a “first part of a saga” issue, either – the entirety of this game can be completed in an hour or so, tops, and at a point where the story is only just getting started.

To make matters worse, it’s not even a very good hour, either. There are virtually no characters here that are likeable, with the main character being a huge jerk of a father and husband, and players are often given dialogue tree options only after he’s said or done something pig-headed or stupid.

It’s not just bad characters, either – the writing is pretty low-quality as well. Dialogue is unnatural, words are misspelled (“I suddenly got quesy”), and in one spot a dialogue option apparently had a placeholder that never got replaced with final dialogue, simply leaving an option of “CHOICE/RIFFLE” that leads to an incomprehensible bit of what I have to assume is code followed by a gunshot noise (I guess “riffle” meant “rifle”).

$5 for a Visual Novel game is pretty inexpensive, but the way Perseverance hides what it is from the player feels really disingenuous and slimy, and even if that was unintentional, what’s included here doesn’t even feel like a decent-sized fraction of a complete experience. And even if the severely incomplete nature of this game wasn’t an issue, the lack of quality control and poor writing standards would spell doom for this as a Visual Novel. Do not buy Perseverance – at best it’s an incomplete mess, and at worst it’s an outright scam.

tl;dr – Perseverance is a Visual Novel about the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse. And by “beginnings”, I mean that this game is actually only the first part of a story, covering only about a half hour or so of gameplay. What’s worse, that half hour is filled with unlikable characters, poor writing, and numerous spelling and grammatical errors as well as buggy code. Do not buy this shoddy, incomplete disaster of a game.

Grade: F

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