This game is carelessly written. The author might have a germ of talent, somewhere, but he needs to work on it, to put in the time; this has all the appearances of being composed in a hurry. Look at the lazy, unfunny repetition in the first room description:
My office: small, squalid, depressing. [...] Nothing that might alleviate the general feeling of small/squalid/depressing that hangs over it. [...] Yes, small and squalid and depressing certainly describe this place to a tee.Not only does the description run out of ideas after sentence one, it also has the gall to compliment its own descriptive skills. The author often has definite impressions about what he wants to say, but doesn't take the effort to organise them into flowing prose. A lot of the sentences look like quick, temporary placeholders for something better:
The staff are smiling and friendly and there is a general feeling of relaxation hanging over everything.might as well have been left as
staff -- smiling, friendly, etc. something general feeling of relaxation something.At the same time, his impressions don't go too deep; room descriptions tend to be waffly and avoid detail, which sometimes leads to such unwitting bathos as
The smell of meat hangs in the air, indicating this place was once used to store food of some kind.Food... such as meat, perhaps? At other times, the author simply can't be bothered putting in any work at all, as in the following speech option:
2) Make something up. >2 I make up a lie on the spur of the moment.Uh... care to tell us what it is? Or can't you make anything up? But maybe I'm asking for too much; since the author doesn't even seem sure of the name of his PC (Standler or Chandler?) he probably has enough on his plate.
If there's a ring of "will this do?" about the prose, there's an even greater ring of "will this do?" about the story, which has an improvised feel, and not in a good way. The plot is nonsensical, with almost nothing resolved in any of the endings. For a while it looks as though the game will count back the seven days to the first scene, but the counting stops at day four; I'm not sure how any of the endings, or even the existence of multiple endings, is compatible with the first scene.
Perhaps worst of all, Requiem doesn't work as an IF game. It starts out as one of those barely interactive stories where typing >N takes you up eight flights of stairs, spits three screens of text at you and dumps you in a hospital bed with the time advanced by 24 hours. Then about half-way through, Requiem turns into one of those games with timed events where you have to guess the verb to advance to the next cutscene, or start all over again. Either way, I feel like I have no input into what is going on.
Rating: 2