Wreck 'Em in Requiem

It's right there in the name.

It's no surprise that a game that originally launched as Requiem:Bloodymare is best known for its gore. Indeed, in the wider MMOverse this is really all it's known for, and I'm not sure I've ever read an article about the game that didn't include words like blood, gore, viscera... You get the picture, and the picture is mostly painted in red.

Yes, I've fought some rock monsters that just broke into rubble upon death, or even just fell over, but the vast majority of enemy types in Requiem are flesh and blood, or perhaps more accurately meat and blood. In fact the average monster's body mass appears to be about 90% blood judging by the copious spray that accompanies every hit, with the other 10% being what ragdolls across the landscape in multiple pieces when you deliver the killing blow.

It's little wonder that this is what people remember about Requiem. MMOs, for all that they have astonishingly high body counts, don't generally do bloody violence, so this game's DOOM levels of guts 'n gore does set it apart.

Requiem also does the same thing as DOOM and those other early 90s games that pushed the boundaries of video game violence; ensuring that the player will have no qualms about what they're doing by making the enemies unequivocally monstrous. No one had a problem with taking a chainsaw to a demon in DOOM, or shooting Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, and likewise the monsters in Requiem are just that – monsters. You do encounter ostensibly human opponents from time to time but even they lack any discernable human characteristics, and most enemies are warped and twisted monstrosities that are all bloody flesh and exposed bone, and that's before you hack them to bits. It's Final Fantasy via Hellraiser, or Pokemon as visualized by Heironymous Bosch and Francis Bacon.

 

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