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Got this for the interesting style and world. I enjoyed the inventory management, augment system, and shooting mechanics.

But the level design is pretty bad, with massive areas with no real purpose other than to make you run more, and elevators that take minutes to reach a floor because a building is unnecessarily massive.
As well as baffling decisions (Like the first mission has a train station that is supposedly owned/controlled by a group, but their headquarters has no connection to it nor presence on it??). I found myself getting lost so many times, especially with a lack of varied color and a compass that’s just there for show it seems.

While I like how there are various goals to do in a mission, with each having multiple ways of accomplishing them, the simple enemy AI (that can hear you walking through multiple solid walls) don’t make things fun.

Maybe things will get polished when it fully releases, but with the asking price I say look elsewhere for now.

Being a breakcore and immersive sims fan, I instantly bought this game as soon as I saw the trailer. Not disappointed at all.

On the first playthrough you can't even imagine how many ways there are to complete each level. No hints at all: only a journal, some notes and a giant location you've been thrown to. For some people that type of game design may be frustrating. But it's exactly the feeling of wandering around in search of a goal that made me adore this game.

At first glance level design may seem controversial because of the huge empty areas. But every location has so many hidden paths and secrets that the scale isn't even an issue. And the visual design, heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell and other cyberpunk titles, only adds to the atmosphere.

Since Peripeteia is an immersive sim, you'll find advanced stealth mechanics and sick implants that can be obtained only in specific places. Peripeteia also got some cool features like bullets/mag management similar to Escape from Tarkov, which is totally unexpected in an imsim game.

Game has its flaws since it's an indie in Early Access, but I enjoyed every minute I spent exploring a post-soviet cyberpunk city while the overexposed lights were blinding my eyes and the Sewerslvt OST was blasting around.

Let me preface this by stating that I did love this game, and recommended it highly to my friends. I enjoyed the gameplay, worldbuilding, and the surreal gritty cyberpunk aesthetic it has. I've played it quite a bit, as you can see, and have gushed about it to others. Unfortunately, I can no longer in good conscience recommend it, and have taken the step to explicitly recommend it, given who benefits from the sales, the kind of community the developers have made, and the great harm that can result from being exposed them and their ideas.

In October 2025, it came out that one of the three key developers ranted about the Signalis fandom, saying it was full of "groomers," and ranting about the horrors of innocuous things seen in memes shared by transgender people, as well as lamenting the tamest of lesbian-couple fan art. Those in the transgender community are well aware that saying "groomers" like this is a coded slur towards us, coming from a baseless and absurd accusation that transgender people are a danger to children. Don't forget that this was the same baseless accusation made towards gay men 40 years ago, until it became too unacceptable. Defenders of these statements by the developer said that they referred to actual grooming related to self-harm. Not satisfied with this explanation, I did some digging.

What I uncovered was worse than I had imagined. Beyond the forementioned developer having a nearly obsessive hate for Signalis and its community, the Discord server community itself is based upon 4chan, almost completely unmoderated, and filled to the brim with bigotry. A bot automatically replaces racial slurs with innocuous terms, and it performs this function frequently. The r-slur is liberally used and encouraged, with the forementioned developer claiming 'no autistic person has ever been called that for being neurodivergent' (in spite of the lived experience of friends and family), and was used heavily in direct insults by another developer. The extremely hostile attitude towards Signalis and queerness seen in the first dev mentioned is prevalent throughout the server, with increasingly tasteless, graphic and fascistic terms used as pseudonyms for the game.

In regards to transphobia specifically, the server has created its own code phrase for transgender people, referring to them as "bone infected," apparently a reference to the risk of osteoperosis that can come from feminizing hormone therapy. It is used in a dismissive and insulting way, and while I cannot verify it due to the insulted users being banned, I believe it has also been used alongside intentional misgendering. There was also much in terms of hostility and denigration in regards towards anything LGBT, toxic insults and arguments between the developers and other users, and very casual usage of far-right tropes and language, including the Nazi salute of Adolf Hitler. Add to this harassment of users and a credible claim of a former server member being doxxed during a developer livestream by the moderator for the livestream chat, and it all speaks to an incredibly hostile, bigoted, and toxic culture that the developers have promoted in the game's community. It has spread from their Discord to Steam's own forums, and every venue where the game is discussed, with these claims being simultaneously dismissed, while bigots applaud the developers and endorse them.

It is for these reasons I have to dissuade others from supporting this game—there should be no place for this kind of monstrous behavior. The more copies of this game that are sold, the more incentive the developers have to continue development, and maintain the toxic community they've made. That community can corrupt more people as the game grows in success, spreading the same hateful beliefs. The game itself already has hints of this, with a book referencing racial science, a poster using the r-slur, and an ableist statement by an NPC. While a forgiving eye might see these things as examples of how flawed and awful the characters in the world of Peripeteia can be, knowing what I know now, I cannot see them as such, and I fear that, with further development, the game may well have more casual prejudice and hateful ideology snuck into it. It's tragic that such a promising game was made by such prejudiced people.

Peripeteia

Peripeteia is a rare example of a game that doesn’t merely imitate the classics of the immersive sim genre, but boldly tries to push it forward. The Ninth Exodus project feels like a spiritual successor to Deus Ex and System Shock, yet it carries its own identity — bleak, cold, and irresistibly captivating in its post-industrial, pseudo-Eastern-Bloc aesthetic.

Atmosphere and World

The game plunges you into an alternative reality where cybernetics coexist with rusted concrete monoliths and the political echoes of long-collapsed states. The world is imperfect but alive: dark stairwells, abandoned labs, faceless bureaucrats, the hum of electronic systems. The mood is strengthened by a superb soundtrack — cold, industrial, yet melancholic.

Gameplay

The first thing to understand: Peripeteia doesn’t aim to be comfortable. It’s rough, sometimes awkward, and that’s precisely what makes it fascinating.

Open-ended mission design encourages experimentation.

Stealth, parkour, hacking, shooting — everything works, though with the charming clunkiness of indie development.

The verticality of the levels is genuinely impressive: almost every building is a puzzle of its own.

The game rewards attention and unconventional thinking — there are no “correct” paths, only the ones you invent.

Story and Characters

The narrative is delivered fragmentarily through dialogue, documents, and environmental storytelling. It’s a game where the player assembles the world piece by piece. The protagonist, Maria, is not a typical lead; she’s quiet but hardened, almost a phantom drifting through the wreckage of a broken system. The story can feel abstract at times, but its power lies in tone and subtext.

Technical State

This is the weakest aspect. Peripeteia suffers from: physics glitches, odd NPC behavior, unstable optimization.

Still, for fans of the genre, this often feels more like part of the charm than a fatal flaw — especially considering the ambitions of a small team.

Conclusion

Peripeteia is a game for those who miss bold immersive sims that combine freedom of approach with a memorable atmosphere.