République Episode 1: Exordium (PC) Review

There is an air of mystery and intrigue from the get-go with République, as players are thrown straight into the action, but not as the lead character, Hope, rather someone (or something) that can leap from mobile phones to security cameras, overriding locks, listening in to answering machine messages, tapping into emails, and more, along the way, ultimately guiding Hope away from her captors, through an intricate maze of corridors, eventually to relative safety.

That is the entirety of Episode 1: Exordium - plain and simple. It is a mere case of avoiding guards in all manner of ways, from simply creeping passed them, to using pepper spray or Tasers to incapacitate them temporarily or permanently (respectively), or even causing distractions to draw them away. There may be times where Hope does not quite crouch and move quietly when desired, or even moments where she wanders off into trouble when not clicking exactly where the game expects the pointer to be pressed, but, fortunately, such instances of frustration are few and far between, barely impacting on proceedings.

There is not much to the game, at first, and the dodge-and-move, dodge-and-move repetitive gameplay can grow tiresome quite quickly, despite the gorgeous aesthetics and stellar voice acting included alongside the unusual setting of a world where core literature has been banned due to 'poisonous' content and captives seem to wear dog collars to track movement, vital signs, and who knows what else. Thankfully, with slick controls for moving Hope around by using a traditional point-and-click interface, as well as using the mouse to jump from camera to camera in order to get a better view to check if her path is clear or not, when the atmosphere starts to pick up further into the episode, the simplicity of the overall experience fades away and the adventure as a whole becomes far more engaging. The espionage element kicks in, the narrative runs deeper, and the attention is fully grabbed with both hands.

There may be times where thoughts wander towards the 'what is the point?' sort of territory, yet whilst in charge of the cameras, whatever the helpful user-controlled IT-literate entity is can actually be upgraded to unlock previously inaccessible doorways, as well as jump ahead of where Hope is currently situated, gaining access to rooms she otherwise cannot enter and sniffing out more breadcrumbs of story to garner more player interest. By the final stages of Episode 1: Exordium, having collected a plentiful supply of the forbidden books, as well as various Easter Eggs, there is a real sense of wanting more, which is quite handy since République Episode 2: Metamorphosis landed on the same day as the first one launched.