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A Brief History of the République (canon info)
République is not a super well-known game (but you should totally play it!!), so I've written up a summary of Episodes 1-5 here. Obvious warning for spoilers, as well as talk of suicide.
Terminology:
Pre-Cal: short for “pre-calibration”. The children who live and learn within Metamorphosis. Not much is known about where they came from; the events of Episode 4 and 5 suggest that every child has clones or possibly that they are clones of each other.
Metamorphosis/the République: a city-state run by the Headmaster/the Overseer/the Captain, Kenichiro Treglazov. A surveillance-state at its finest, it is theoretically billed as a “more ideal society”, but is extremely secretive and totalitarian. It is generally implied that most citizens are not allowed to leave (...alive).
Prizak: the guards in Metamorphosis. For guards of what is ostensibly just a school, they are well-equipped (pepper spray, tasers, sleep gas), and are often abusive to the children.
Recalibration: a punishment for those who cause trouble within Metamorphosis. Not much information is provided about it, but it presumably involves memory-wiping/brainwashing.
Manifesto: Treglazov's magnum opus and the state book of the République, chronicling both his life and the ideals he has conceived to better perfect society. Altered copies have been distributed by a failed revolutionary, Daniel Zager, which expose Treglazov's lies and preach against his message; by the time the game begins, Zager has been dead for some months, but his Manifestos and secret hideouts still exist.
Plot
Republique begins (Episode 1) with the player receiving a phone call from a Pre-Cal, 390-H (or “Hope” as she calls herself), begging for assistance. She has been caught with contraband - a "poisoned" or altered Manifesto - and will now be scheduled for Recalibration. Mireille Prideaux, the students’ head caretaker, and Quinn Derringer, head of the Prizrak, take her to a holding cell for interrogation; the closest Prizrak on hand, Frederick Cooper, finds the cellphone the player is connected to and sneaks it back to Hope in the hope that the player will be able to help her escape. The phone Hope has (itself another piece of contraband) does indeed have some very useful abilities, namely "OmniView", which connects the player to the many cameras and locked doors in Metamorphosis and allows them to guide Hope through the facility.
With the player’s assistance, Hope breaks out of the holding cell and goes on a quest to get to the Librarian, who is sympathetic to the plight of the Pre-Cals and can supposedly protect her from Mireille and Derringer. Along the way, Cooper keeps in touch via text-to-speech messages (he writes that “it is too dangerous to use my real voice”), providing advice and wry commentary.
Despite taking a roundabout route to the library due to the OmniView software needing to be updated to open the library doors, Hope and the player manage to sneak her through. She is then caught by Mireille (Episode 2), who takes her to be interrogated, asking what “they” know about Metamorphosis and slapping her when she refuses to answer. Before Mireille can finalize the order to Recalibrate Hope, a masked Prizrak enters the room and tasers Mireille, allowing Hope to escape. She and the player resume their journey to the Librarians office; unfortunately, once they finally reach it, they find the old man dead on the doorstep. The sheltered Hope breaks down before finding video evidence of who committed the crime: Derringer. (The player is given the choice of letting Hope watch the video, which is not graphic but has audio of the murder recorded, or of keeping Hope in the dark.)
With the Librarian dead, Hope is left with only one option: escape the facility on her own (and with help from the player). In the Librarian’s secret room, she finds a schematic for the Overseer’s key, which will give her access to the garden and the outside world. Cooper directs her and the player to a 3D printer located in the Archives; the key is successfully replicated and Hope makes her way to the elevator to the rest of the facility and then the surface.
(Episode 3) In a bout of bad luck, Derringer steps onto the elevator as well, and fights briefly with Hope before she manages to stun him with his taser and escape. Hope and the player then make their way to the offices of Metamorphosis’ newspaper, the Morning Bell, to steal a keycard for the elevator to the surface. Hope is caught by the Bell’s head writer, Maddie Sade; in a surprising twist of fate, Maddie offers to help, having finally had enough of being a part of the Republique’s propaganda machine that erases the murders of innocents such as the Librarian. With Maddie’s assistance, Hope and the player access two huge, seemingly-omniscient data servers and research the two Prizrak guarding the service elevator. Maddie’s plan is to use the propaganda machine against them, writing up twisted narratives about supposed crimes or immoralities that they have committed. Though Hope expresses discomfort at this plan, it is successful; meanwhile, Cooper is called away from his desk and is unable to continue texting the player.
Derringer arrives with a squadron of Prizrak to arrest the elevator guards. Unfortunately, he leaves a masked Prizrak behind as a replacement guard, causing Maddie to lead Hope and the player to the security feed for the replacements room so that they can collect data on him and quickly come up with a reason for him to be removed as well. Maddie suggests that they use whatever information they can to frame him for the attack on Mireille earlier.
Propaganda published, Hope and the player make their way back to the elevator just in time to see the Prizrak cornered by Derringer. Derringer tips the mask off of the doomed man's head, and his identity is revealed: Frederick Cooper. As Hope watches in horror, Cooper is pushed around by Derringer and knocked to the floor; he spots her in her hiding place and whispers her name before being pulled away by Derringer to face his fate. Maddie yells for Hope to run for the elevator and she does so, then collapses, sobbing and mumbling that she is a good person.
At this point (Episode 4), the plot becomes somewhat nonlinear. The player spends Episode 4 with a girl who looks like Hope, but acts more childish and seems not to know much of what is going on. Nevertheless, the player guides her through the gardens and graveyard of the Republique, picking up more information on the purpose of the city-state and of the Pre-Cals themselves. The data that can be collected includes information on encoding raw information into DNA, a massively more dense storage system than any existing computer hardware; on two scientists, Dr. Abal Ammash and Dr. Noam Peretz, who work for Treglazov on experiments with DNA and children called 'Mirrors'; and on plots by Treglazov to collect and use large amounts of information from the world's social media, spy cameras, public and private records, etc. to gain power in U.S. and international governments. In the meantime, an abnormally large and mentally unhinged man called Mammoth chases after the Hope-like girl, referencing a "Directive" he's been told to carry out, and throttling her if he manages to catch her.
Eventually, it is revealed that Zager, the revolutionary who created the altered Manifestos, faked his own death and has been working with Mireille to undermine Treglazov. Zager and Mireille come across the Hope-like girl, but she does not recognize them, and they disappear before more can be uncovered. Later, the player discovers where the 'Mirrors' - clones who are kept in stasis for most of their lives and are related in some way to the Pre-Cals - are kept, and that Zager recently broke in and tried to help them escape into the wilderness.
The Hope-like girl finally manages to elude Mammoth for the last time, and finds the door to escape the island. She runs into Treglazov, who calls her 390 (no "-H") and then shoots her, killing her.
Episode 5 then picks back up with the real Hope, who is shown to have been caught shortly after taking the elevator to the garden and dropping her phone in the dirt, where the Hope-like girl presumably found it and picked it up.
Hope is interrogated by Derringer and Treglazov, who explains to her that she is a human hard-drive, her DNA encoded with the world's information at the time of her birth. The process of "Recalibration" is one of reformatting a corrupted hard-drive, a process she has apparently gone through many times before; in addition, she is not the only one with data in her genes, but is a "copy of a copy of a copy". He proclaims her too broken to be reformatted again, and points his gun at her, but is interrupted by a video of Zager. The revolutionary sets off bombs that have been planted throughout the facility, causing Treglazov and Derringer to flee. Hope escapes as well, grabbing her phone and finding the underground room where Zager and Mireille are orchestrating the revolution.
The episode then splits into two paths: one in which Hope chooses Zager’s plan to conduct the revolution violently and arm a faction of rebel Prizrak with guns, and one in which Hope chooses Mireille’s plan to sway the loyalist Prizrak by erasing the made-up criminal charges keeping them in Metamorphosis. Either way, Hope and the player eventually make it to the central databank, Terminus, and destroy it by overheating it.
(The game then sends the player into a weird dream-like sequence where pieces of information can be extracted from satellites around the world. Some of it just reiterates or clarifies Treglazov’s plans, but others reveal that there are other 390-[x]s out in the world, all dealing with varying forms of memory suppression and mental illness. A few are shown to be in therapy, describing a "man in white gloves" [Treglazov], and one insinuates that he is her father. This is overall a very weird part of the game and it's not entirely clear what's going on or how much Hope sees of it, but there's a possible implication of these bits being data stored in Hope's DNA.)
Derringer then appears behind Hope on top of Terminus, and attacks her. He tells the player via the phone that he is going to kill her, but she hits him first with either a spare handgun (Zager's route) or a degaussing gun (Mireille's route), causing him to go into cardiac arrest and fall off of the giant databank to his death. Mireille and Zager open the hatch above her and lower down a hoist to lift her to safety, with the help of a rescued and smiling Cooper.
The game cuts to black here, but then resumes in an epilogue where Hope is witness to Treglazov's presentation of the Republique as a city-state to the world. In the middle of the presentation, Treglazov gets the news that Derringer is dead and Terminus has been destroyed; all of the Pre-Cals have been disposed of due to "Directive 95". The only remaining "databank" of his is 390-H, whom he calls out for in agony. When he uses her chosen name instead of her number, Hope runs out from cover to face him.
Hope and the player are then faced with three options: go with Treglazov, who needs Hope for her DNA or his dreams of power will be lost forever; go with the Vice Admiral of the US, who has been revealed to have been illegally collaborating with Treglazov but who also promises Hope asylum if she cooperates with him; or go with Mireille and Derringer, who demand that she follow them on their escape via boat. No matter which the player chooses, Hope hesitates. She then turns to the player/phone and addresses them directly, telling them that she deeply appreciates all that they've done for her but that she now has to make her own choice in life. Although she cannot swim, she leans backwards off the edge of the railing and falls into the ocean, and the phone dies.
Terminology:
Pre-Cal: short for “pre-calibration”. The children who live and learn within Metamorphosis. Not much is known about where they came from; the events of Episode 4 and 5 suggest that every child has clones or possibly that they are clones of each other.
Metamorphosis/the République: a city-state run by the Headmaster/the Overseer/the Captain, Kenichiro Treglazov. A surveillance-state at its finest, it is theoretically billed as a “more ideal society”, but is extremely secretive and totalitarian. It is generally implied that most citizens are not allowed to leave (...alive).
Prizak: the guards in Metamorphosis. For guards of what is ostensibly just a school, they are well-equipped (pepper spray, tasers, sleep gas), and are often abusive to the children.
Recalibration: a punishment for those who cause trouble within Metamorphosis. Not much information is provided about it, but it presumably involves memory-wiping/brainwashing.
Manifesto: Treglazov's magnum opus and the state book of the République, chronicling both his life and the ideals he has conceived to better perfect society. Altered copies have been distributed by a failed revolutionary, Daniel Zager, which expose Treglazov's lies and preach against his message; by the time the game begins, Zager has been dead for some months, but his Manifestos and secret hideouts still exist.
Plot
Republique begins (Episode 1) with the player receiving a phone call from a Pre-Cal, 390-H (or “Hope” as she calls herself), begging for assistance. She has been caught with contraband - a "poisoned" or altered Manifesto - and will now be scheduled for Recalibration. Mireille Prideaux, the students’ head caretaker, and Quinn Derringer, head of the Prizrak, take her to a holding cell for interrogation; the closest Prizrak on hand, Frederick Cooper, finds the cellphone the player is connected to and sneaks it back to Hope in the hope that the player will be able to help her escape. The phone Hope has (itself another piece of contraband) does indeed have some very useful abilities, namely "OmniView", which connects the player to the many cameras and locked doors in Metamorphosis and allows them to guide Hope through the facility.
With the player’s assistance, Hope breaks out of the holding cell and goes on a quest to get to the Librarian, who is sympathetic to the plight of the Pre-Cals and can supposedly protect her from Mireille and Derringer. Along the way, Cooper keeps in touch via text-to-speech messages (he writes that “it is too dangerous to use my real voice”), providing advice and wry commentary.
Despite taking a roundabout route to the library due to the OmniView software needing to be updated to open the library doors, Hope and the player manage to sneak her through. She is then caught by Mireille (Episode 2), who takes her to be interrogated, asking what “they” know about Metamorphosis and slapping her when she refuses to answer. Before Mireille can finalize the order to Recalibrate Hope, a masked Prizrak enters the room and tasers Mireille, allowing Hope to escape. She and the player resume their journey to the Librarians office; unfortunately, once they finally reach it, they find the old man dead on the doorstep. The sheltered Hope breaks down before finding video evidence of who committed the crime: Derringer. (The player is given the choice of letting Hope watch the video, which is not graphic but has audio of the murder recorded, or of keeping Hope in the dark.)
With the Librarian dead, Hope is left with only one option: escape the facility on her own (and with help from the player). In the Librarian’s secret room, she finds a schematic for the Overseer’s key, which will give her access to the garden and the outside world. Cooper directs her and the player to a 3D printer located in the Archives; the key is successfully replicated and Hope makes her way to the elevator to the rest of the facility and then the surface.
(Episode 3) In a bout of bad luck, Derringer steps onto the elevator as well, and fights briefly with Hope before she manages to stun him with his taser and escape. Hope and the player then make their way to the offices of Metamorphosis’ newspaper, the Morning Bell, to steal a keycard for the elevator to the surface. Hope is caught by the Bell’s head writer, Maddie Sade; in a surprising twist of fate, Maddie offers to help, having finally had enough of being a part of the Republique’s propaganda machine that erases the murders of innocents such as the Librarian. With Maddie’s assistance, Hope and the player access two huge, seemingly-omniscient data servers and research the two Prizrak guarding the service elevator. Maddie’s plan is to use the propaganda machine against them, writing up twisted narratives about supposed crimes or immoralities that they have committed. Though Hope expresses discomfort at this plan, it is successful; meanwhile, Cooper is called away from his desk and is unable to continue texting the player.
Derringer arrives with a squadron of Prizrak to arrest the elevator guards. Unfortunately, he leaves a masked Prizrak behind as a replacement guard, causing Maddie to lead Hope and the player to the security feed for the replacements room so that they can collect data on him and quickly come up with a reason for him to be removed as well. Maddie suggests that they use whatever information they can to frame him for the attack on Mireille earlier.
Propaganda published, Hope and the player make their way back to the elevator just in time to see the Prizrak cornered by Derringer. Derringer tips the mask off of the doomed man's head, and his identity is revealed: Frederick Cooper. As Hope watches in horror, Cooper is pushed around by Derringer and knocked to the floor; he spots her in her hiding place and whispers her name before being pulled away by Derringer to face his fate. Maddie yells for Hope to run for the elevator and she does so, then collapses, sobbing and mumbling that she is a good person.
At this point (Episode 4), the plot becomes somewhat nonlinear. The player spends Episode 4 with a girl who looks like Hope, but acts more childish and seems not to know much of what is going on. Nevertheless, the player guides her through the gardens and graveyard of the Republique, picking up more information on the purpose of the city-state and of the Pre-Cals themselves. The data that can be collected includes information on encoding raw information into DNA, a massively more dense storage system than any existing computer hardware; on two scientists, Dr. Abal Ammash and Dr. Noam Peretz, who work for Treglazov on experiments with DNA and children called 'Mirrors'; and on plots by Treglazov to collect and use large amounts of information from the world's social media, spy cameras, public and private records, etc. to gain power in U.S. and international governments. In the meantime, an abnormally large and mentally unhinged man called Mammoth chases after the Hope-like girl, referencing a "Directive" he's been told to carry out, and throttling her if he manages to catch her.
Eventually, it is revealed that Zager, the revolutionary who created the altered Manifestos, faked his own death and has been working with Mireille to undermine Treglazov. Zager and Mireille come across the Hope-like girl, but she does not recognize them, and they disappear before more can be uncovered. Later, the player discovers where the 'Mirrors' - clones who are kept in stasis for most of their lives and are related in some way to the Pre-Cals - are kept, and that Zager recently broke in and tried to help them escape into the wilderness.
The Hope-like girl finally manages to elude Mammoth for the last time, and finds the door to escape the island. She runs into Treglazov, who calls her 390 (no "-H") and then shoots her, killing her.
Episode 5 then picks back up with the real Hope, who is shown to have been caught shortly after taking the elevator to the garden and dropping her phone in the dirt, where the Hope-like girl presumably found it and picked it up.
Hope is interrogated by Derringer and Treglazov, who explains to her that she is a human hard-drive, her DNA encoded with the world's information at the time of her birth. The process of "Recalibration" is one of reformatting a corrupted hard-drive, a process she has apparently gone through many times before; in addition, she is not the only one with data in her genes, but is a "copy of a copy of a copy". He proclaims her too broken to be reformatted again, and points his gun at her, but is interrupted by a video of Zager. The revolutionary sets off bombs that have been planted throughout the facility, causing Treglazov and Derringer to flee. Hope escapes as well, grabbing her phone and finding the underground room where Zager and Mireille are orchestrating the revolution.
The episode then splits into two paths: one in which Hope chooses Zager’s plan to conduct the revolution violently and arm a faction of rebel Prizrak with guns, and one in which Hope chooses Mireille’s plan to sway the loyalist Prizrak by erasing the made-up criminal charges keeping them in Metamorphosis. Either way, Hope and the player eventually make it to the central databank, Terminus, and destroy it by overheating it.
(The game then sends the player into a weird dream-like sequence where pieces of information can be extracted from satellites around the world. Some of it just reiterates or clarifies Treglazov’s plans, but others reveal that there are other 390-[x]s out in the world, all dealing with varying forms of memory suppression and mental illness. A few are shown to be in therapy, describing a "man in white gloves" [Treglazov], and one insinuates that he is her father. This is overall a very weird part of the game and it's not entirely clear what's going on or how much Hope sees of it, but there's a possible implication of these bits being data stored in Hope's DNA.)
Derringer then appears behind Hope on top of Terminus, and attacks her. He tells the player via the phone that he is going to kill her, but she hits him first with either a spare handgun (Zager's route) or a degaussing gun (Mireille's route), causing him to go into cardiac arrest and fall off of the giant databank to his death. Mireille and Zager open the hatch above her and lower down a hoist to lift her to safety, with the help of a rescued and smiling Cooper.
The game cuts to black here, but then resumes in an epilogue where Hope is witness to Treglazov's presentation of the Republique as a city-state to the world. In the middle of the presentation, Treglazov gets the news that Derringer is dead and Terminus has been destroyed; all of the Pre-Cals have been disposed of due to "Directive 95". The only remaining "databank" of his is 390-H, whom he calls out for in agony. When he uses her chosen name instead of her number, Hope runs out from cover to face him.
Hope and the player are then faced with three options: go with Treglazov, who needs Hope for her DNA or his dreams of power will be lost forever; go with the Vice Admiral of the US, who has been revealed to have been illegally collaborating with Treglazov but who also promises Hope asylum if she cooperates with him; or go with Mireille and Derringer, who demand that she follow them on their escape via boat. No matter which the player chooses, Hope hesitates. She then turns to the player/phone and addresses them directly, telling them that she deeply appreciates all that they've done for her but that she now has to make her own choice in life. Although she cannot swim, she leans backwards off the edge of the railing and falls into the ocean, and the phone dies.