Peripeteia

Somewhere between the death of Deus Ex and the corporate flattening of the modern open world, the immersive sim became a genre people wrote eulogies for. Arkane got absorbed and redirected. Warren Spector’s disciples scattered. The big-budget version of “go anywhere, solve it your way” collapsed into a checklist of glowing waypoints and three dialogue options that all lead to the same cutscene. What survived went underground — to Poland, apparently, where a tiny studio called Ninth Exodus has spent years building the most uncompromising thing in the genre since Thief.

Peripeteia is a cyberpunk immersive sim set in an alternate-history post-Soviet Poland, and that setting alone separates it from a decade of Blade Runner cosplay. There are no neon-drenched Tokyo streets here, no rain-slicked Japanese signage bolted onto a Western city. Instead you get concrete. Rust. Bureaucratic decay. A city where the state collapsed but the surveillance apparatus didn’t, where black-market cybernetics get installed in basements and every faction is running a scam on every other faction. Call it post-Sovietpunk — the aesthetic hasn’t been mined to death, and it shows in every corridor.

You play Marie, a cybernetically augmented supersoldier working mercenary jobs in a city that has no interest in your redemption arc. The game moves freely between first and third person, blends shooting with stealth and hacking and RPG progression, and — critically — refuses to tell you where to go.

The market position is unusual. This isn’t competing with Cyberpunk 2077; it’s competing with the memory of Deus Ex, and it’s doing so from Steam Early Access, where it launched February 21, 2025. Console versions are announced through publisher Top Hat Studios. This is a niche product that knows exactly how niche it is, and never once flinches from it.

• True Immersive-Sim Level Design: Large, open, fully explorable hub levels with zero quest markers and no objective hand-holding. You read the environment, talk to NPCs, and route yourself — through maintenance ducts, past a bribed checkpoint, or straight through the front door with a rifle.
• Dual-Perspective Movement: Free switching between first and third person, not as a gimmick but as a tactical tool. Third person for cover geometry and reading Marie’s momentum; first person for precision and threat assessment.
• Physical Grid Inventory: Over 100 weapons and items managed through a Tetris-style spatial grid. Space is finite, decisions have weight, and looting is a genuine act of triage rather than a vacuum-cleaner minigame.
• Branching Mission Consequences: Missions support multiple outcomes that ripple forward into later chapters. Factions remember. Choices compound.
• Cybernetic Progression: Augments meaningfully alter how Marie moves and fights — changing your movement vocabulary, not just your damage numbers.
• PS1-Era Art Direction + Industrial Score: A deliberate low-poly aesthetic paired with an acclaimed industrial soundtrack that does enormous work establishing tone.

The Gameplay Loop

Here’s the thing about removing quest markers: most games that try it are lying. They strip the compass and then put a glowing NPC and a bright yellow ladder in your path, so you’re still on rails, just with worse UI. Peripeteia is not lying. You get dropped into a sprawling district with a vague objective and an inventory, and the game structurally does not care whether you figure it out.

The opening stretch is disorienting in a way that modern games have trained out of us. You wander. You get lost. You find a locked door and have no idea whether it’s a puzzle, a shortcut, or scenery. And then — usually a few hours in — the district clicks into a mental map, and the game transforms. Suddenly that duct you crawled past connects to the security office. That NPC you ignored sells the keycard. The checkpoint you couldn’t shoot through has a bribe price. This is the real product: the moment where spatial knowledge becomes power, and the level stops being a maze and starts being a machine you know how to operate.

That payoff is rare and it’s earned. It’s also gated behind an onboarding wall that will lose a meaningful percentage of players, and Ninth Exodus knows it. There’s no tutorial that fixes this, because the disorientation is the design. Either you find that thrilling or you find it hostile. Both reactions are correct.

Combat, and the Elephant in the Room

Combat is the weakest system in the game, and it’s not close. Enemy AI is clunky — guards notice you through geometry they shouldn’t, or fail to notice you standing in the open. Gunplay has a stiffness to it, a disconnect between input and impact that never quite resolves. Third-person shooting in particular has an awkward relationship with the camera that makes close-quarters fights feel like a wrestling match with the controls.

What saves it is context. In a game where combat is the answer, this jank would be fatal. In Peripeteia, combat is one of four answers, and it’s explicitly framed as the expensive one. Going loud costs ammo you can’t easily replace, attracts factions you’d rather avoid, and burns inventory space on weapons you might rather fill with tools. The friction in the shooting pushes you toward the systems that actually shine — stealth routing, social bribery, environmental problem-solving. Whether that’s clever design or a happy accident of an unfinished build is impossible to say from the outside. The effect is the same.

Inventory as a Design Statement

The grid inventory deserves its own paragraph because it’s doing more work than it appears to. Spatial inventories are divisive — Resident Evil 4 fans love them, Diablo refugees hate them — but here it functions as the game’s core economy. You cannot carry everything. A rifle eats real estate a lockpick kit could occupy. Every looted item poses the same question: is this worth what it would cost to drop something else?

That question is the RPG progression. Not a skill tree, not XP bars — the running negotiation between what you’re carrying and what approach you’re capable of. It’s the same reason Escape from Tarkov‘s inventory sings while a hundred looter-shooters’ inventories are just spreadsheets. Constraint creates character.

Story and Characters

Bluntly: the narrative doesn’t hold up. The story is disjointed, the characters are largely forgettable, and the through-line between missions is loose enough that you frequently forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. Marie is a compelling avatar — an intriguing shape, cybernetic and worn-down and mercenary — but she’s not yet a compelling character.

The world-building, however, is excellent, and those are different skills. The environmental storytelling — what’s written on the walls, what’s rotting in the corners, how the architecture betrays what the state used to be — communicates more about this world than any of its dialogue does. Ninth Exodus can build a place. Populating it convincingly is the unfinished work, and Early Access is exactly the right place for that to still be true.

Pacing Problems

The environments are too big. Not always, but often enough to name it. Some districts sprawl past the point where exploration is rewarding and into pure traversal tax — long empty stretches between the interesting bits, with no fast travel and no movement tech fast enough to compensate. When the density is right, this game is extraordinary. When it isn’t, you’re jogging through an empty parking structure wondering if you missed a turn.

The low-poly PS1-era aesthetic is the most confident decision in the entire package. This is not nostalgia bait or a filter slapped over modern geometry. It’s a coherent visual language: harsh polygonal edges, murky texture work, and an atmospheric fog that hides the draw distance while doing genuine mood work. The limitation is the style. Faces are crude, so your imagination fills them in. Environments are abstracted, so they read as impressions of places — which suits a game about a country that half-remembers what it used to be.

Paired with the industrial soundtrack, it produces something no photorealistic cyberpunk game has managed lately: actual dread. The score is one of the best in indie games right now, all grinding low-end and mechanical percussion, and it carries scenes the animation can’t.

Technically, this is Early Access, and the build reflects it. Clipping, animation hitches, scripting hiccups and occasional soft-locks are the kind of issues an unfinished build of this scope invites, and the default control mapping demands remapping time. None of it looks catastrophic on paper, but this is a work in progress and the price of entry should be paid with that understood.

Steam is the only place to play this right now, and mouse-and-keyboard is the only sane input. The hacking, the grid inventory, the precision required to read environments and place shots — all of it is built around a cursor and a full keyboard. Controller support exists but the third-person camera and inventory manipulation both fight a thumbstick.

The Early Access framing on Steam is doing important consumer-protection work here, and the store page’s warnings deserve to be taken at face value. The refund window matters: the two-hour Steam refund limit sits almost precisely inside the disorientation period, which means a lot of players are likely bouncing off this game right at the moment before it becomes good. That’s a genuine structural problem for Ninth Exodus and worth knowing going in.

Console versions via Top Hat Studios are announced but unreleased. Waiting for a 1.0 build before assuming the controller experience gets fixed in port is the sensible call.

Peripeteia is the rare Early Access game where the incomplete state is incidental to what makes it interesting. The bugs will presumably get fixed. The AI will get tuned. The environments will get populated. What won’t change — what’s already fully present in the build — is a design philosophy that treats the player as an intelligent adult capable of navigating an unmarked world, and a setting that finds new territory in a genre everyone assumed was exhausted.

That philosophy is worth more than polish, and Peripeteia is loaded with original ideas: the spatial inventory as economy, the district-as-machine level design, the way going loud is priced as a genuine strategic cost rather than a default. Ninth Exodus is a small studio swinging at Deus Ex, and connecting more often than it has any right to.

But brilliance buried under this much friction is a hard sell at $18.74, and the onboarding wall, the disjointed story and the oversized districts are real problems, not charming ones. We can’t recommend it to most people — not yet. Buy it only if you want to be there while an immersive sim gets built and you have the patience the design demands; wait for 1.0 if you want to be handed a finished one. Just don’t dismiss it as jank — under the rough edges, this is the most interesting thing happening in the genre.