Robinson's Requiem

Title		Robinson's Requiem
Game Type	RPG
Publisher	Silmarils 1994
Players		1
Compatibility	OCS and AGA (dedicated AGA version exists, 256 colours)
HD Installable	Yes
Submission	Nimrod

Review
You are a Robinson; an explorer for AWE (Alien World Exploration).

You have been recruited from a military academy (as have all Robinsons)
for a five year mission to "explore strange new planets" and determine
their fitness for human habitatiion.

At the end of your 5 year stint, you are placed back into society, a hero,
and your party is known as a Robinson's Requiem.

But, for you, there is one problem - On one of your explorations, you,
and some other Robinsons, have picked up an alien virus. To prevent
this spreading, the AWE have decided to place you on a previously
unexplored planet and leave you to die.

This is the premise to the game.

It's a typical RPG type game, good graphics and not bad animation, within
a realtime 3D environment, viewed in first person perspective. You are
tasked with trying to survive not only the hostile environment but the
local wildlife and other members of AWE who are also abandoned and who are
not as friendly as they might be due to the virus.

You must do the usual things (find water, weapons, food, medicine, etc.)
but you also have the ability to manipulate and combine items to produce
new items. For example, if you have some cord and you add it to a
branch, you can make a bow. Adding your needle and thread to some
animal skins will produce a new garment.

The landscape varies from mountains, crevasses, canyons, waterfalls,
bridges, desert, all inhabited by lifeforms of one type or another.

One major part of survival is your health which you are able to monitor
by use of your bio-computer. Items such as body temperature, stress,
fatigue, pain, poisoning, malaria, even gangrene (if you don't attend
to wounds) and hallucinations. You can even amputate your own limbs,
if you need to! According to the manual, these all add up to over 100
variables to be managed in real time, although you can choose not to have
that high a level of reality.

For me, a novice when it comes to RPG type games, I found it both
interesting and frustrating. I managed to get the hang of the control
panel and the general operating system very quickly. Some of the
puzzles and gameplay I found awkward, but that's down more to my
inexperience rather than any real fault with the game. The
combinations possible to manufacture new items are logical and obvious,
but I found them to eventually become a slight distraction.

Overall, I would rate this quite highly - a straight forward, practical
RPG stripped of all the swords and sorcery that RPG's usually involve -
but a real turn off for a science fiction devotee rather than fantasy fan,
like myself.

Alphabetical list.