Depths of Peril - Review @ Play this Thing

This isn't really a full review but it's a quiet news week and I thought some readers might like to check out this site.  Greg Costikyan from indie portal Manifesto Games and head of one of the IGDA chapters also runs a site called Play this Thing!, which highlights a single new worthwhile indie game every day.  I've been watching it for a while and Depths of Peril is the first RPG to pop up (other than roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress) but I've discovered a couple of entertaining games from other genres, so indie fans might want to have a look.  So, on Depths of Peril:

The real enemy isn't the orcs or whatnot, but those nasty bastards on the other side of town; and you win by eventually becoming powerful enough that you can go on a raid, and wipe them out. Or, for that matter, build an alliance with other covenants, and earn an alliance win by taking out your mutual competitors.

Now this is all rather--odd, in its own way; but it has some real strengths as a gameplay dynamic. For one thing, when you complete a linear RPG like Diablo, you're done; you could replay it, but it'll basically be the same game all over game. In Depths of Peril, you may well find that after five hours of gameplay, having explored only a small fraction of the world, you've succeeded in obliterating the opposing covenants. And by cranking up the difficulty level (which is measured on several independently choosable scales, by the way, including opposing AI aggressiveness, starting levels, and so on) you can wind up playing a much different game. In short, while it may not have the infinite replayability of a Civilization, it has vastly more replayability than a typical RPG.