During your journey, smashing trough swarms of monsters, items and copper pieces are dropped depending on the type and level of the monster. I have to admit that they are a little cheap on the money but there’s enough items to go and sell to a vendor. The items have 5 types of rarity: Normal, Common, Uncommon, Rare and Very Rare. These items are placed in the inventory, that contains 4 inventory bags, the armor slots (boots, leggings, belt, vest, helmet… the whole deal) and additional rings, jewelry and a necklace.

When venturing into combat, you always have a party member with you. You can display his info and equipment, see his skills, all the stats and what weapon or armor he uses. You can even “upgrade” him by giving better weapon or armor for a greater support in battles.

Quests can be found on almost any NPC in the city, quests that usually consists in killing X number of monsters, scout some forest, find a buried treasure, kill some more monsters… stuff like that, this quests may be timed or not.

You can also recruit new members for your covenant, but you must prove your worthiness first. They give you a certain task and if you are the first covenant to complete it and return to him within the given time (all the recruiting quests are timed) he will join your covenant.

On the bottom of the screen you have up to 10 slots where you can equip your weapon and different skills or spells. There are also buttons for the character screen, house layout (pedestal), skills screen, inventory, map, journal, quests and the mini-map.

The skills differ for all the character types except for the last two: Bonus and Basic. For example, the Barbarian has Offense where skills like Power Strike and Crushing Blow are found; Focus that contains Enrage or Weapons Mastery; and in Defense there’s all kind of passive defensive skills. If we take a Priest, Offense contains spells like Holy Fire or Holy Strike; Faith has Heal or Divine Intervention (adds Faints - mana); and Buffs with Shield of Fire, Hardiness (adds Vitality points) or use of Mail Armor.

Everything that happens in the City of Jorvik and the covenants are tracked and displayed through messages that appear over the skill/spell bar on the bottom of the screen. If a new member is available for recruit, who is the leading covenant, what quests other covenants completed or if some monsters formed a group some place, you’ll know.

The map isn’t that big but it’s filled with caves and lots of respawning monsters. If you feel like seeing your progress of the game to the point, the Journal displays the total kills, deaths, max damage dealt, quests solved, also stats for every player or best among your characters.

But what make the game unique is the relations with enemy factions. A grid with all the covenants and the diplomacy states, influence, power and taxes are shown. If you have guards protecting the covenant, they will need money, being some sort of mercs. Each faction has two perks that will give advantage from the rest. Some are Lucky (finds more and better items than others), Financial (get bonus to tax), some are Aggressive (tends to start wars and raids quicker). All of factions can trade influence, items, crystals, money, create trading routes or alliances. The relations area of the game is very well customized and developed for a RPG, it even has graphs for comparison the influence and power.

Depths of Peril is a great game with brilliant ideas but maybe too late. If you give it a little time you will see that it is, in fact, very challenging maybe yet addictive.