Depths of Peril Impressions

Shamus at Twenty Sided has cranked out some impressions of Soldak Entertainment’s indie RPG/strategy hybrid, Depths of Peril.

The strategy aspect of the game can be seasoned to taste. When you set up the game world you can decide how much of it you want. You can fill the world with rival covenants that are so weak that you can ignore them, or you can arrange things so that the maintaining of your covenant is front and center. One nice twist is that you can see what items they other covenant leaders have picked up, and the game even puts up a nice notice when someone gets their hands on an extraordinary item, or part of a set of items. If another faction picks up something you like you can try to trade for it. This makes finishing sets a lot more interesting.

There is a common container shared by all your characters, so that you can move items between characters. This fixes the problem in other games where you needed two computers in order to accomplish this.

The skill system is interesting. Skills get progressively more expensive to upgrade. This encourages you to spread the points around, giving you lots of skills to play with. This is in contrast to Diablo and its ilk, where you developed one or two abilities at the expense of all others. Depths of Peril encourages variety instead of monotonous min-maxing. Finally, you don’t have to worry about miss-spent points. You can recover skill points and re-invest them in other skills if you need to, so you never have a (broken) character. It costs money to do this, but again, it encourages you to experiment with the skill tree and see what you like instead of just dumping everything into one super-ability.