There have been a lot of new games that are trying to be old games over the last few years. Trust me, I’ve covered a few of them. Whether it’s the visuals or the mechanics, the indie space has been a treasure trove for memba berries so strong that we’ve seen entire memba orchards spring up, and the PSX-alike has basically become a subgenre of its own. Crow Country, Lunacid, and Sorry We’re Closed are just a few that spring to mind for capturing the charmingly rough, suitably fuzzy edges of the generation of yesteryear.
But DERELIKT from Visuwyg honestly feels like someone found a prototype PS1 game inside a packet of Salt & Lineker crisps and decided to finish it.
From the scanline-heavy intro to the whirring disc wheel on the loading screen to the fact that your saves are stored on a digital memory card, I can’t remember a game ever going in this hard on being a modern PS1 game — and this is all just from a brief gameplay slice.
The set-up for DERELIKT will be familiar to fans of Event Horizon, Dead Space, or even DOOM 3. Basically: scientists discover space things beyond mortal comprehension, attempt to comprehend them, now everything is worms. You are sent in to clear up the mess. Bring a mop.
Also familiar are the games it feels like DERELIKT is taking direct inspiration from. Alien Resurrection was the most immediate for me, which comes down to the look and feel of the space station — dark, broken, and, most importantly, yellow and quite wobbly. I might be imagining it, but there’s even an arcade cabinet that seems to be directly referencing both the game and the movie.
But there’s also elements of Sentient, that bonkers language game where you board a space station and try to figure things out with loads of random words. It’s a similar thing here, with the full game suggesting that you have to discover who’s telling the truth about who unleashed what.
Inspirations don’t just stick to the wobbly world of the PS1, though. System Shock is another obvious one, with one of the first keycodes being 0451, maintaining a long standing tradition of paying homage to Fahrenheit 451 in immersive sims. While the immsim-ness wasn’t too strong from what I played in terms of mechanics, DERELIKT has captured the feel of them marvelously well, with you going up to every object like it has very complicated patterns to figure out what it does. And then once you’ve scooped something up, you then have to try and find room for it in your classic survival horror inventory.
DERELIKT does have some more modern mechanics to prove that it’s not just a nostalgia machine, though. Players can collect Insight, which can be spent to unlock stat boosts, though at the expense of other stats. I couldn’t really feel the impact of these from my preview, but would love to see how this works in the full game. Similarly, I gave an injured NPC a code for them to get through a door and join me in the hub, but I also had the option to give them wrong ones, too. I’m fascinated to see how this could play out over a full playthrough.
So far, this is a game that I could talk about for hours, even though I’ve only played an hour. From the cheat codes to the background lore to just how fun it is to go back and re-explore areas to see what you missed, DERELIKT is shooting for the stars.
I am hoping, however, that the horror and difficulty is dialed up a little for the full release sometime this year. While it has a heavy atmosphere, I wouldn’t say DERELIKT is scary as such. This might be because I was outfitted with a pistol, assault rifle, and shotgun within five minutes of each other basically right at the start of the game, and also I had more ammunition than people have reasons to hate Ed Sheeran.
Even if it never ends up being scary scary, I’m still seriously interested to have my galactic shivers be timbered. Some modern retro games are love letters. DERELIKT seems like it wants to write the book.
A Steam key was provided by PR for the purposes of this preview.
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