Republique (PlayStation 4) Review

Primarily a stealth game, République takes place inside a facility called 'Metamorphosis,' a massive complex filled with guards, where mysterious experiments are performed on its inhabitants. One such candidate, a young woman named Hope, who makes contact with an outsider through her phone, someone she begs to help her escape the facility. Tasked with navigating her across such treacherous domains is quite an undertaking, and she will need all the help she can get.

Moving around the map jumps between two main roles - while Hope moves around the map, hiding, and stealthily dodging guards and security, the outsider jumps from security camera to security camera, scouting ahead, unlocking doors, and cracking codes to useful items or passageways. The system does get a bit garbled at times, and it's easy to lose Hope while jumping ahead to check for threats, and the views often become slightly disorienting after time.

Each camera has a fixed radius, and they can all scout anything in their field of vision. Switching between cameras takes an extremely indeterminate amount of time, ranging from instantly to several seconds. The delay is frustrating, and the transitions are more than a little annoying to deal with. Changing the way each room looks also ends up being a little odd, and the whole system definitely takes a bit of adjustment.

While the primary function of the cameras is to scout guard routes and plan paths through Metamorphosis, a lot of information about the world can be found through newspapers, terminals, and even random decor. Each piece of information has a bit of narration that plays, which really adds to the immersion of the world, if not in an initially confusing way.

République is definitely compelling in its storytelling, but it starts off at a very slow boil. There's a lot of early information thrown in early on, and it does make for some confused plot progression through the episodes. Much of the information from the first couple of episodes doesn't really come together meaningfully until later chapters. While it's compelling, nerve-wracking, and fascinating, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense until all of those pieces come together.

While the cameras don't have much trouble picking up info or involving themselves with the scenery, Hope struggles a lot more. She's very clunky to control, and transitioning between her three modes of movement (crouching, walking, or running) is difficult to the point of being unusable. Luckily, it's pretty easy to stay crouched for a significant amount of the time, and it's a pretty handy way to avoid guards early on.

Combat is almost entirely reactionary, and Hope really never wants to get involved in it if she can. There are a couple of weapons like pepper spray and a Taser gun - single-use weapons that can temporarily put guards out of commission. They are generally a last resort and, for the most part, guards are little more than an inconvenience, and they are usually pretty easy to slip around.

While individual story objectives change from episode to episode, the true goal is uncovering as much information about the République as possible. There's a massive trove of information contained through audio logs, emails, profiles, and conversations. Most of the information can be found while progressing through the facility and it's a great way to incentivise backtracking across the map once abilities unlock older areas.

Unfortunately, there is indeed a lot of backtracking later on, and the frequent transition times between cameras, combined with Hope's slow movement, do make it a bit of a chore. Despite that, République's narrative is compelling enough to make it through room after room, just to hear that missing audio log. It's a fascinating story, and it's one of the best integrations of storytelling into stealth-based gameplay out there. It does hit some odd high and low moments towards the end, and the plot feels very hurried upon reaching the conclusion, but it definitely does deliver on the mystery.