Reworked perk system

Initially the perk system was just a small feature that added some quality of life improvements. For example you could choose to have a perk that made secrets more easy to find or reduced the time it took to respawn at a checkpoint after death.

But during testing I realized that the perks are boring. There was not much incentive to look for perk points as the benefits they introduced were quite small and had negligible impact on gameplay. So I decided to change this and make the perk system an important part of the game.

New perks

I kept some of the old perks - for example the one that helps find secrets is quite nice if you don't want to look up guides on the internet but prefer to discover stuff on your own.

But many new ones were added with the goal of allowing the player to customize how he plays. Lets look at a couple of perks as an example.

Perk: Sprinter

You move 20% faster, but campsites no longer save your progress.

This is an example of a perk that gives a passive bonus (movement speed) but also introduces a drawback: you can no longer save your game during a chapter (progress is still saved upon completion of a chapter though!). This could be quite interesting for getting those speedrunning badges, but there is a risk - if you die too much, the speed bonus will be negated and your only option is to restart the run since you have no intermediate saves!

Perk: Dark thoughts

There is a 33% chance that weaker enemies will be killed by Mindblast.

This perk adds a new ability to one of the skills - the possibility to kill an enemy (and not just stun it)! It won't work always, but can be very useful against sections where there are many enemies - killing one of them could mean the difference between success and failure!

Tiered progression

One problem with a flat perk system is that one can easily pick the most powerful perks at the start of the game. Also, some perks are useless since they interact with particular skills that are not yet unlocked at the beginning of the game. For this reason I have separated the perks into three tiers. You will need to pick a perk or two from lower tiers before you can choose a perk from the highest tier. This way you will have to think a bit about what to choose!

Last thing that I had to solve was how to approach the problem of choosing a wrong perk. After all, you cannot know which perk is good for you if you don't try it first. And what to do if you find out a particular perk does not suit your playstyle? Don't worry. You will be able to reset your perks at the start of each chapter. Once you progress a bit further, this option will no longer be available so make sure you have the right perks for the challenge ahead of you!

Feedback wanted

What do you think about these changes? Do you have some ideas for perks? Hop into our discord and let us know!