Indie gaming continues to shake up PC gaming with innovation, games which are usually better than their big budget funny looking cousins and usually end up being the games we gamers love to talk about. Lately indie Role Playing Games (RPG’s) have been finding their way to gamer’s hard drives faster than ever before and 2008 was certainly a banner year for my favorite game genre.
We are taking a look at a not so new but almost a year old with Soldak Entertainment’s Depths of Peril, a complex and fun game with a ton of potential and features I am sure many other games will offer in the years to come. One of which includes a great faction based single player raid system which determines who will lead the Barbarian city of Jorvik by fighting other factions to the death. You will die often during these fights, but death is never a problem since you will resurrect back at your home base and you can quickly head back to the fight.


When you first start the game you will play through a tutorial which I must say is well done for the basics, but it is very boring and feels more like a chore in the end rather than a fun experience which makes you want to keep playing the game. In fact I walked away from the game for a few hours after the tutorial to recharge after the experience. Once you do get past the tutorial the game becomes more enjoyable and you will find the game much more compelling and worthwhile.

The game is part RPG and part strategy game where you control your faction and compete against other factions who you can trade, war, raid them and even use diplomacy as you try and compete against the games other factions. A deep story mixes with the deep gameplay to provide you with an overall experience you probably have never seen before.


Graphically the game is good for an average indie title, but they could be better as I found the color palette to cause almost a bleeding effect as you move through the random world. You do become used to this color bleeding effect so it is not a major issue at all, just a slightly annoying one at first. The audio on the other hand is decent and unlike many other games of the indie variety does not annoy the hell out of you.

While the game has plenty of good there is some bad as well which can be a deal breaker for many gamers and that is how the game deals with difficulty and death of NPCs. There are times when the game is insanely difficult for not reason, especially after a very easy couple of an hour, when the game throws a ton of monsters at you and will wipe out the entire town of Jorvik leaving you as the lone survivor and that is it; you are stuck at a true game breaking moment. This type of game breaking event is so rare in today’s games and gaming in general you might be more than a little put off at the entire experience.


Depths of Peril is not a game I would recommend for those who are new to Role Playing Games or those who prefer the simple Japanese Role Playing Game formula or even the more action paced RPG’s out there. This is a game more for the old school and harder core Role Playing Gamer who loves depth and consequence from their actions, something missing from almost all RPG’s we see today.

The game’s system requirements are very low and the game will run on a huge wide variety of PC’s which is very nice. The game also works on Windows PC and Mac’s which is great for our friends out there who still try to game on Apple computers hoping for more than World of Warcraft and eight year old Windows games being ported over.

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
1.2 GHz Pentium 4 (or other equivalent)
128MB RAM
GeForce 2 (or other equivalent)
150MB of hard drive space

2.0 GHz Pentium 4 (or other equivalent)
256MB RAM
GeForce 3 or better (or other equivalent)

OS X 10.4 or 10.5
1.5 GHz processor (PowerPC or Intel)
128MB RAM
GeForce 2 (or other equivalent)
150MB of hard drive space

2.0 GHz processor (PowerPC or Intel)
256MB RAM
GeForce 3 or better (or other equivalent)


In the end I will give Depths of Peril a final score of 7.5/10 and a try before you buy since there is a demo you can download and give the game a solid try.

Posted by Brian Edey (Falelorn)

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