The Episodic Stealth Game That Predicted Our Surveillance Decade

République hands you a surveillance network and asks you to use it for good. Camouflaj built the stealth-adventure game with Logan Games, and GungHo Online Entertainment published it. You watch Hope through security cameras and talk to her by phone or computer. It is a clever idea, and the game rarely trusts it.

Hope, Pre-Cal 390-H

You play as yourself, or close enough. Hope, a teenage resident of a facility called Metamorphosis, calls you for help. She is a Pre-Cal — short for pre-calibrated — one of the adolescents raised from birth in isolation, educated and experimented on to serve the plans of Headmaster Kenichiro Treglazov. Dwight Schultz voices Treglazov. Rena Strober voices Hope.

Your job is to guide her out. You hack the cameras and electronic locks of the totalitarian state, watching through the OMNI View software, unlocking doors, distracting guards and pulling information the state would rather keep. The fiction is that you are a person on the other end of a line, not a soldier.

The premise has teeth. A game about watching a young woman through security cameras, made as the scale of government surveillance was becoming public knowledge, is not a neutral setting.

Cameras, Locks, and the Version You Upgrade

The mechanics are built around limited access. OMNI View lets you lock and unlock doors, distract patrolling enemies and gather information. Stronger security needs a higher version of the software, so you upgrade to reach nodes and areas that were closed to you.

On OS X and Windows, you can pull up multiple cameras at once. That version best fits the fantasy: a wall of feeds, a target moving between them, a system you are slowly learning to read.

The stealth is tactical and the puzzles are point-and-click in structure, played from a bird’s-eye or isometric view. Five episodes carry the story, and the seams between them show.

The Cartridges and the Banned Books

Collectibles are game cartridges and banned books. The cartridges are Easter eggs for real indie games of the period: Papers, Please, Year Walk, Bastion, The Room, Super Hexagon and VVVVVV among them. The banned books are real too — Animal Farm, Frankenstein, Brave New World.

That is a good joke and better world-building. A regime that treats small independent games as contraband, and bans novels like Animal Farm, tells you what it fears.

Five Episodes, Five Platforms, One Problem

République arrived in pieces and kept arriving. Here is how the releases stack up:

The spread is impressive and it is also the problem. The game’s original home was a touchscreen, and a phone in your hand is a different object from a controller on a couch. On PC or console you are a person watching a screen. The distance the game wants to collapse comes back.

What the Surveillance Story Gets Right

The best thing République does is refuse to make Hope a passenger. She talks. She pushes back. She is the one in the room, and you are the voice in her ear, and the game is honest that this is an unequal arrangement.

The Prizrak, Treglazov’s security force, are the enforcement arm of an ideology spread through his writings. The Pre-Cals are raised inside it, conditioned to follow his rules. Hope is designated 390-H, a number, and the game never lets you forget that the number is the point.

What it does not do is push the idea far enough. The surveillance mechanics are clever, but the game treats them as tools rather than as a subject. You hack a camera because a camera needs hacking. The question of what it means to watch someone without their consent — even to save them — gets raised and then set aside for the next locked door.

Hope Carries More Than the Story

République is a good idea executed unevenly. The OMNI View system is genuinely novel, the collectibles are a small triumph, and Hope is a better character than most games of this size manage. Against that: the episodic structure fragments the pacing, the puzzle design is thin in places, and the port to larger screens costs the game some of its intimacy.

It is worth playing for the premise alone, and worth finishing for Hope. It is not the definitive game about surveillance in the internet age. It is a smart, flawed one that got closer than most.

The published critical score is 6.9/10, an IGDB critic aggregate drawn from 10 outlets. That number is the consensus, not this paper’s own.

Camouflaj · game review · Indie Games · République · stealth game · surveillance