Trial-and-error is what Depersonalization does best. Unlimited runs and a generous saving system let players correct their wrongs seconds after finding out what their mistake was. Still, the game leaves players with so little guidance that their first experience of Depersonalization might feel confused or aimless. Learning a trick or two, then, and uncovering essential areas of gameplay in advance can help smooth some of the rough edges of this unique game.
6 Feel Free To Run Away
Not every character in Depersonalization can survive every encounter, and that’s okay. Unlike many other games, Depersonalization always leaves room for a well-timed escape. The narrative will morph following the player’s choice of fleeing an encounter instead of defeating their enemies, just as it does during dialogue choices or skill rolls.
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Running away from combat requires good Sports skills, and is especially good when paired with a high agility score, which lets characters act first in combat (i.e., before they’re dead). Often, a successful escape will be as valuable, if not more, as beating an opponent. Either result could lead characters down mutually exclusives paths in the story, and fleeing might just be the one more suited path for that character.
5 Retry Fights If Needed
Once a player starts getting a feeling for the game’s system, they’ll learn to intuit when a fight was lost because of their careless planning or bad dice rolls, as opposed to when they had no chance of winning whatsoever. If the player feels like they had a fighting chance, then they would do well to retry that fight.
Retrying a fight is as simple as pressing the appropriate button after losing a fight. It’s important to remember, though, that players can’t retry a fight they just won. That can be important because fights in Depersonalization aren’t just a matter of surviving: leaving a fight alive but with few HP and no healing items can make the rest of the mission impossible.
4 Re-roll Dice When Appropriate
Many actions in Depersonalization depend on the character’s skills and on a roll of the dice. The results of each roll can go from 1 to 100 while player skills max out at 80 or even just 60, depending on the skill and the character’s class. Random chance, then, often plays a much bigger role than skill when deciding if an ability check is successful.
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Just like how Depersonalization doesn’t push players back to the main menu after dying in combat, most ability checks can be tried multiple times with only a slight loss of Luck. While it might not be wise to retry a roll with a chance of success in the single digits, this system radically changes the odds in the player’s favor.
3 Death Doesn’t Mean The End
What comes after death? A loading screen. Sothoth the loading screen girl might have an imposing name, but not all that she says is true. When she reassures the protagonist that even if they won’t cease to exist, they will feel the sting of death just as well. She doesn’t get at just how inconsequential dying is in this game.
Dying is a great way of resetting fights that didn’t go as planned. It’s the result of doing the wrong thing on purpose just to see what happens. What follows is a prompt to load a save file, the most recent of which always leads to the start of the current scene. Depersonalization is, at its core, a game about exploring, and this mechanic encourages a trial-and-error approach that is rare among RPGs.
2 Check The “Refine” Tab Often
The TAB menu is one of two menus in Depersonalization. While another menu is responsible for the character sheet, the TAB menu is a sort of expanded inventory, containing additional menus for things like magic, clues, and Refine. This last tab is one of the few areas that the game’s slim tutorial completely ignores, but it’s absolutely fundamental for some builds.
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Any character with points in the Craft skill should try and make use of this mechanic, which allows for items to be combined into better version of the original or into completely new weapons and tools. For example, characters who put a lot of points in Shooting but don’t start with a firearm can craft a simple bow and immediately become more deadly in combat.
1 When In Doubt, Put Points In Agility
Depersonalization doesn’t really explain the full scope of many abilities present in the game. It’s clear, for example, that Intelligence governs a character’s total MPs, but it’s not clear to what extent it affects conversation and scenes. Agility decides how often a character will dodge attacks, effectively reducing incoming damage by 100%, but it also seems to influence how quickly they can act in combat. This makes it an essential skill to build quickly.
Acting before the enemy means one more chance of taking less damage, or even winning the fight before receiving even a single hit. Acting first during the first round can even allow especially feeble characters to run away from the battle before their opponent gets a chance of acting.
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