Playtime: 26h.
For a long time I have wanted to keep track of the games I played and my opinions on them. Both for the sake of keeping some sort of log, and to send to friends, when I get asked about game suggestions.
Too bad I didn’t start earlier, but there is no point trying to change the past (as most time travel games seem to agree on) and better now than later. Or never.
After having loved the first game and finding it a impressive show for a small studio, this sequence is a bag of mixed feelings to me.
Plot
Amicia and Hugo embark on a new adventure that, honestly, reminds me a lot of the first game’s.
While I find the central message touching, and some onion cutting ninjas found their way to my side when I figured how the game would end, the turns and twists throughout the game are surprisingly poor and feel way too forced.
To the point that what I think should be a story driven adventure game becomes a patchwork of interesting set pieces loosely tied together by poor writing, full of events shoehorned into the script because otherwise some pieces of the game wouldn’t fit well together. Well, some of them don’t fit, and going through them leaves a very sour taste in your mouth.
Gameplay
The gameplay mechanics around stealth, the use of light, the rats and the alchemy props are nothing new, but they’re used in engaging ways. But although those systems seem to work well, quite often completely unexpected things happen. Not good unexpected, but “I just walked around these rats/this guard and they didn’t attack/notice me, why did it happen this time?”.
This happened often enough that I stopped experimenting with those mechanics due to their lack of predictability and resorted to just killing enemies efficiently, instead of trying to sneak through them or using environmental hazards/items to deal with them.
This offensive approach has a bad impact on an otherwise very nice new mechanic: you unlock skills/bonuses in traits according to how often you use them. So if you’re often sneaky, it ends up becoming easier to bypass enemies; if you’re resourceful and can distract/dispose of enemies in different ways, you get bonuses for that; and if, like me, you’re killing them often, you become a killing machine. This mechanic ended up not being meaningful to me, as I didn’t feel rewarded enough to engage with less deadly approaches.
Graphics
The game is a looker. Heavy to run, but not without a reason. It is not surprising that it made into Digital Foundry’s Best Game Graphics of 2022.
Some of my game screenshots, spoiler-free. Look at that level of detail.
But, to counter balance that, although character models are delightfully detailed, their animation is of very poor quality. Check out this merchant’s facial expression as he says something funny and giggles:
This isn’t limited to less important NPCs, as many main story cut scenes look and sound wonderful, but the faces… oh, the faces.
Performance
The game loads fast and runs very well, I didn’t experience a single crash during my 26h playthrough (yeah, I like to take my time and leave no stone unturned).
But I experienced loads of what I believe were content streaming stutters, as when you’re walking back and forth through the largest open areas of the game, you frequently stutter, at the very same spots.
Performance also tanks on the more NPC dense areas, as the market in the opening bit of the game. I have no clue why this is the case, as the GPU isn’t taxed more than on other places, but the CPU gets hammered. Those NPCs aren’t smart at all, they just loop through their animation, as far as I can tell.
Conclusion
Playing requiem was plentiful entertaining, once I determined that their systems were finicky and I better play it safe. I felt engaged with the 2 main characters, and only them. And finishing the game left me satisfied, and longing for more, as I think any good game should.
But I learned to accept its limitations during the first hours, and had to turn a blind eye to most of the plot.
I won’t recommend it to everyone, but if you tell me you’re interested and ask if I think you should play it, then yeah, very likely.
Thanks Geert Jan, for unknowingly motivating me to do this, via your unashamed movies list website.