14 DAY TRIAL // 
Whenever I see atrocious characters that spout nonsensical one-liners about how everyone wants to see the Cole Train play, I wonder whether anyone actually likes these abominable creations or they are simply the spawn of uninformed and ignorant minds, trying to please some fictitious masters.
It feels like a committee voting on what these youngsters today would like, rather than like allowing creativity to run its natural course, and letting artists try to do their thing in a more direct and sincere manner.
If people actually like the Cole Train and its many dudebro variations that keep popping up in video games, then it's my bad for wanting some genuine humanity in my entertainment, instead of having obnoxious frat boy cliches shoved down my throat by people desperate to appear cool and edgy.
What Cole Trains and regular folks have in common is the fact that they all die when shot in the head. The only thing keeping immature and trite blabbermouths from shutting up is the fact that friendly fire is disabled in video games. That's why I appreciate when someone actually tries to create something with a soul, like Republique Remastered.
Storyline
You play the role of a disembodied entity assisting a teenager named Hope make her way through the halls of a dystopian city-facility. The setting is a sort of mash-up of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and Orwell's "1984," and the general vibe is very BioShock-y.
Censorship, totalitarian governments, freedom, self-determination, the power of knowledge, the cult of personality, illusions of grandeur, a ruthless determination embracing Niccolo Machiavelli's school of thought, everything serves to craft an immersive world that gradually opens up through logs, emails, voice messages, and conversations, luring you in and making your ever more curious to decipher its underpinnings.
Like every great story, it attacks subjects that have been disputed since the days of Greek philosophy, and to which we haven't yet found a definitive, unambiguous answer, and adds a touch of mystery and speculation that allow it to evolve those notions and offer its own narrative and thus interpretation on the tackled subjects, in the process allowing you to express your own questions in regards to them.
The action takes place within a huge facility known as The Metamorphosis, inside a mysterious totalitarian state.
The powers that be keep a watchful eye on everything that goes down through an extensive surveillance network, and you have to make use of their own tools, from tapped telephones to being able to scrutinize and scan everything, including secret documents, using the ubiquitous cameras, in order to guide Hope through all the perils and help her make her escape.
You are her only hope to avoid "recalibration," a sentence she earned for reading some propaganda materials left behind by Daviel Zagar, the recently executed dissenter.
The weird way in which the world is constructed is very similar to the contrived particularities of the many dystopian novels and films created over the years, and developer Camouflaj is not afraid to make a parade out of all the influences that went into crafting its own universe.
In fact, much of the nuance of Republique is gleamed by listening to its creator's thoughts on different revolutionary novels and concepts that captured the minds of many throughout human history, and seeing him explain his own credo and how it came to be.
Books are banned, the free flow of ideas is dangerous, art is worthless, and everyone must be the same, following the Republique's directives as gospel.
Gameplay
The game is focused almost exclusively on stealth, as there is little to do but run when engaged directly with the oppressive Prizrak, the citizens of the totalitarian state, and thankfully there is no shooting.
You guide the young Pre-Cal, a girl born and raised at the facility, molded by the philosophy of the Overseer, like so many others, but why exactly you are helping her is a mystery in the beginning.
You get help from an insider, a hacker that assists you in your journey, but why he is offering it is also beyond your knowledge. He also asks that you retrieve his collection of banned video games, with a ton of great indie titles such as Gone Home, Shovel Knight and Bastion being referenced.
Like a ghost inside a machine, you jump from one security camera to the next, scouting ahead, room by room, and instructing Hope when to dash from cover, assisting her in unearthing the many secrets of The Metamorphosis.
The game has a very cinematic feel, with a ton of exposition and cutscenes, and gameplay sequences peppered with phone calls from the mysterious Cooper, reading emails and other such logs, piecing together the reality of the Republique and its past, in order to figure out its future.
You play the game by jumping from camera to camera, inspecting, peeking at newspaper articles, reading other people's email, then selling the information and getting upgrades that also enable you to tap into bugged phone lines or set off minor distractions for nearby guards, or track their position through walls.
In addition to this, the narrative gates your progress through the use of firmware upgrades, which you can only get at specific points while following the story, and are necessary for you to be able to hack some doors or open some item caches.
There is also a sort of resource management system, as some of the actions you can perform, such as temporarily locking doors in order to buy Hope some time to escape once spotted, drain her cellphone battery, and you have to find power stations where she can top it up, or backtrack in order to get a recharge if you botch the plan too many times.
The actual gameplay itself is probably one of the game's weaker points, as it draws you out of the very well-crafted and plausible world in order for you to perform very video gamey things, like avoiding patrols with absurd routes, sell collectible pieces of information to get upgrades to your hacking skills, and so on.
Guards, once alerted to your presence by the noise of your hurried footsteps or by seeing you sneak from one piece of cover to the next with their peripheral vision, will come and investigate your last known location.
Sometimes, you will find yourself in an inconvenient position that doesn't enable you to sneak around or hide, and you'll have to dash in order to escape capture. Unfortunately, the guards don't run too fast, don't shoot you, and perhaps most disappointing, don't even leave the room, most of the time they spot you, so getting away is a matter of effectively running away and waiting for things to cool off while hanging out in the adjacent room, for the most part.
“When you get caught it's not game over, you just get escorted to a nearby cell, and then escape again, which seems a bit inconsistent with the Big Brother theme after you do it for the seventh time.”
This feels very basic, and the game loses a lot of depth here, because there aren't alternate routes or escape paths that you can plan ahead of time and that you have to follow in order to escape capture. You just walk slowly behind guards, getting behind the furniture, and waiting for them to do their second pass so you can carry on, which kind of negates the whole usefulness of the elaborate surveillance system that you yourself make use of.
Some of the blame for the simplistic design can be attributed to the fact that Republique Remastered started life on mobile platforms, an element that you can sort of gleam by the way the interface is designed, by the way you interact with the environment, receiving phone calls and so on.
In any case, even if its mobile roots do show from time to time, the game has been very well adapted to the use of mouse and keyboard, and everything feels very natural and intuitive and works very well within the theme, which is definitely a plus.
You click on the ground to make Hope move stealthily toward the chosen spot, and you double-click when you want her to run, which is noisy but useful when you get spotted.
When you get caught it's not game over, you just get escorted to a nearby cell, and then escape again, which seems a bit inconsistent with the Big Brother theme after you do it for the seventh time. Your possessions get confiscated, but if you pickpocket the guard that dragged you to the cell, you get them back.
You can avoid capture if you happen to stumble upon canisters of pepper spray, which you can use to incapacitate guards for a short duration, and you can even knock them out for good with a stun gun, but there aren't many of those lying around.
In many ways, the game feels more like a point-and-click adventure video game than an action/infiltration game, which is great, as long as you don't expect it to be like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where if the stealth approached failed, you could just pull out your gun and kill everyone.
It's mostly about storytelling, about engrossing you into its world and making you want to dig as much as you can about it.
The action part is done decently too, as you can freeze time by pressing space and explore your environment at leisure, so you never have to hurry up, but having it replaced with a sort of slow motion mechanic would have added to the overall tension.
Sound and visuals
The graphics look overall decent, with the general art direction being something like a cross between BioShock's lush Rapture, before its fall, and more industrial-looking areas, with grey corridors and a slight futuristic tint.
All in all, there is enough variety in the environments, even though they might not be exactly breathtaking, and even if the character models aren't exactly AAA quality.
In short, it works, and it has enough detail in order to convey a believable world and even hint at the opulence that its leaders enjoy.
But where the game really stands out is in its writing and voice acting. All the characters have a lot of personality, and every little comment or recording is delivered very well, making collecting each and every one of them worthwhile.
The Good
- It offers a nice list of novels to read
- Very immersive
- Good writing
- Solid voice acting
- Relatable theme
- Simple but effective mechanics
The Bad
- It feels to vague and generic at times
- Occasional glitches
- Clunky movement
Conclusion
The game has a compelling atmosphere and very good writing, and although there are some slight technical issues that pop up from time to time, they are easily cast aside by the immersive quality of the experience.
It borrows heavily from a lot of great books, with "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984" being the most obvious references, but its biggest sin is that it feels more like it's name-dropping, rather than like actually having anything pertinent or new to say.
It's done well, but everything it offers has already been said and seen before. Granted, it's a very good effort from the team behind it, and I really hope that the story is going somewhere more interesting in the final chapters.
I had a great time playing it and it felt like it had great potential, but for the time being, the conclusion is yet to come. Republique Remastered includes the first three chapters of the story for the moment, with the final two to be added at a later date.
