Robinson's Requiem

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..... SESAME UNDER WATCH - CAUSE OF DEATH : VIOLENT TRAUMATISM

A survival-sim developed by Silmarils, Robinson's Requiem puts the player in the shoes of Trepliev1, an experienced planet-explorer on his last mission before retirement. A lot of thought and care went into the survival system, resulting in all sorts of nasty ways to die, from massive blood loss to food poisoning to hacking off your own limbs.

In the middle of the twenty-second century, humanity continues to flourish... to the point that the Earth and several of its colonies are already over-populated. To try and combat this problem, the AWE (Alien World Exploration) is founded. Its members go through intense training in hopes of earning the right to become a Robinson. Robinsons have no contact with the public or the outside world during their five-year tour of duty: those five years are spent exploring unknown planets, learning as much as they can about these alien environments and determining whether or not they're fit for human colonization. If they survive this grueling, unforgiving ordeal, then they return to massive celebration and a public demonstration held in their honor: a Robinson's Requiem.

But not all Robinsons get to enjoy this heroes' welcome. Not even if they survive their tour of duty.

During their missions, Robinsons can run into all manner of hazards... including unknown virii and potentially dangerous diseases. To ensure there's no risk of others being contaminated, these Robinsons are banished... or worse. You and a few other agents have stumbled across this Awful Truth -- and your superiors suspect that you've learned too much. For your final mission before your Robinson's Requiem, you are sent to Zarathustra, a wild planet with no official record of its existence... or anything else.

Tropes used in Robinson's Requiem include:

• A Winner Is You
• Blind Idiot Translation: The English in the in-game text and the manual is sometimes really weird, and often just wrong.
  • There's also the issue that the actors don't seem to know English, resulting in some hilariously awful FMVs. The meeting with Socrates19 near the beginning is especially amusing.
• The Dog Shot First: To escape the planet, you need to collect the 20 Sesame computer units from the 20 Robinsons previously trapped there. About 2/3rds of the Robinsons are corpses already, but several are still upright and will need to be liberated of their Sesames by force. However, the Robinsons have mostly been driven insane by their time on the planet, and most will turn hostile immediately or shortly after you meet them, so you can kill them in self-defense without any sticky moral ambiguity issues. There are at least 2 Robinsons that need to be outright murdered for their Sesames, though.
• Death World
• The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Particularly when it comes to trying to kill you.
• Eleventh-Hour Superpower: In the final area of the game, the corpse of the final Robinson has a laser rifle on his body with infinite ammo. To compensate, at this point the game starts throwing hordes of enemies at you.
• Energy Weapon: There are very few of these, and they're all aimed at you.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The following list is copied from the manual of the sequel (Deus), but the causes of death are still quite comprehensive:
  • Hypothermia: when the body temperature drops too low.
  • Hyperthermia: when the body temperature becomes too high.
  • Heart attack due to tachycardia: the heart rate is too fast.
  • Hypotension: blood pressure is too low.
  • Hypertension: blood pressure is too high.
  • Drowning.
  • Exhaustion: physical resources exhausted.
  • Uncontrollable haemorrhage: too great a loss of blood.
  • Dehydration: too little water in the body.
  • Hyperalgesia: abnormally great sensitivity to pain.
  • Loss of consciousness: cardiac arrest (often the anxiety level is too great).
  • Alcoholic coma following drunkenness.
  • Venom poisoning.
  • Widespread gangrene.
  • Trauma, violent shock.
  • Suffocation.
  • Electrocution.
  • Asphyxia, inhalation of lethal gas.
  • Drowning: loss of consciousness caused by immersion in icy water.
  • Cyanide poisoning.
  • Burning, incineration.
  • Death by missiles (bullet, laser impact).
  • Overdose: taking too many drugs.
• Eye Scream: You can lose an eye and live, though it naturally makes it much harder to survive. You can also lose both eyes and live, though likely not for very long...
• Fun with Acronyms: Alien World Exploration, AWE for short.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: As the screenshot shows, this is where you go when you die.
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: Darwin5's presence is technically explained by him being one of the exiled Robinsons, but there's no justification whatsoever for him turning into a werewolf. There are hints that the game was Retooled from fantasy to science fiction midway through development (you fight centaurs and goblins, for example), but this is a very flagrant out-of-genre moment.
• Guide Dang It: You might figure out how to survive for a few days without dying a horrible death. But there's no way you'll actually work out how to finish the game without either psychic prescience, looking at a guide, or multiple occurances of playing through to nearly the end and having to restart from the beginning because you rendered the game Unwinnable.
• Giant Spiders
• Have a Nice Death
• He Knows Too Much: The reason why your hero was sent to Zarathustra.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Dying.
• Interface Screw: Most of the interface features are provided via your Sesame computer, including such things as the health scanner, the map and your ability to save games. To allow your escape from the planet, you have to forfeit it, permanently.
  • You can also end up with one, or both, of your eyes damaged, reducing or eliminating your ability to see. This damage is permanent.
• Kill'Em All: To escape the planet, Tripliev has to acquire all of the Sesame computers: one each from every other Robinson. They don't tend to hand them over willingly.
• Let's Play: One by Cyberdud, located here in the Let's Play Archive.
• The Many Deaths of You
• Narm: The live action sequences in the 3DO version of the game, being of the typical quality of the early 90's FMV era.
• Nintendo Hard
• Puzzle Boss: Three of them, all annoying Guide Dang It moments:
  • Kagoo, the giant tyrannosaur, is invincible unless a) confronted outside his cave, and b) blinded first by US Eing the Flare Gun.
  • The Triceratops can only be killed with a Molotov Cocktail, which is doubly obnoxious because finding the components is a Guide Dang It in itself. (Plus, based on how you make it, it's actually a bomb made of black powder.)
  • The Giant Robot is immune to weapons and must be lured into a booby trap made attaching a wire to a battery. As an added bit of Fake Difficulty, putting them together will kill you unless you're wearing the Kevlar Gloves.
• Retirony: Invoked; Zarathustra is meant to be Tripliev's final mission, one way or another...
• That One Level: Arguably all of them, but the Desert especially. You dehydrate fast due to the heat, and there are quicksand pits all over that look almost exactly the same as normal ground. You can get around the former by coming by at night, but that makes the quicksand even more difficult to spot.
• Unwinnable by Design: Tossing away mission-critical items, such as the Sesames. Especially irritating because it's not entirely obvious what's important and what's just weighing you down. Are those heavy Lizard Skins really that important? Turns out, yeah. You need them to make waterproof clothes.