requiescat

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/29/26
Playtime: 10m, playthrough, bonus “Progress” exploration

recqiescat is a dark tale of toxic love. Its title and initial framing are that of looking back on a once-in-a-lifetime emotional relationship, overflowing with milestone memories of meet-cute, great dates and romantic confessions. It hits all the beats of early relationships by presenting a layered recollection where the initial text is warmly reminiscent, and where clickable links expand to even greater detail. The player’s interaction is mostly just exploring these links in an otherwise linear narrative. It presents a world where memories are not cloudy, representational things, but so vital as to have layers of detailed, still-accessible depth. Oh, there are dark clouds too, as the narrator/protagonist recalls (and seemingly brushes aside) warning signs and misgivings of friends and family. Those dismissals actually enhance the totally-smitten character beats in a resonant way, except… we’ll get there.

The early part of the work capably builds its atmosphere of in-denial foreboding. When the turn comes, it is shocking, but maybe not quite the way its textual construction would have you expect. Yes, I am now discussing EXPECTATIONS of THE UNEXPECTED. This one is going to be impossible to talk about without spoilers, so be advised. Whatever blurring I end up doing is almost certainly NOT going to get the job done.

Here’s the thing. This is a past tense narration by one of two principles in a horrific event. The narrator experienced the events of the story, and is relating them to us. We the audience experience the narrative as a shocking twist, but the narrator decidedly does not. They already know how it ends! And yet, the story almost never acknowledges this. Certainly, what the narrator chooses to convey for the first two thirds of the work focuses on the dreamy, rewarding parts of the relationship. This… does not ring true to me. How on earth can these early impressions NOT be colored by subsequent events THIS DIRE? How could hints and clues NOT become apparent in retrospect, given where things led? There is an explanation, but give me a few more minutes to rant first.

This is a story of memories, of what and how the narrator chooses to focus their reminiscing on. A lot of time is devoted to the heady flowering of romantic emotion. Almost NO time is devoted to the inciting event, a narrative whirlwind of (Spoiler - click to show)sexual entitlement exploding into violence. What time IS devoted to it is weirdly oblique and rushed, lacking the immediacy of the more positive memories. The effect is to present a relationship, a reasonably long one, where NO HINT of storm clouds is evident to the protagonist, barring some offhand acknowledgement of others’ concerns. Where the protagonist’s response to the shocking development is not only matter-of-fact but also kind of self-satisfied. You can almost feel their hand waving dismissively! There is no sense of loss, of betrayal in the recollection. Just a matter-of-fact “this is what I did instead.” A loss and betrayal one might easily expect to color ALL PREVIOUS MEMORIES if not PERMANENTLY SCAR. But the prior narrative suggested neither of those things, quite the opposite actually, and that omission becomes the most notable thing about the whole work.

Taken together, the early rose-colored focus and the all but dismissed culminating drama, it kind of paints a picture of the protagonist as a sociopath! To them the dramatic climax is every bit as meaningless (in the long run) as (Spoiler - click to show)the antagonist’s own victims. They are focused on their OWN emotional pleasure to the complete exclusion of others’ concerns and even their lives. It morphs from a story of (Spoiler - click to show)surmounted victimization to one of (Spoiler - click to show)two monsters meeting and only one surviving. That is honestly kind of cool, though the wording and tone of the work does not suggest this is its intent. I am choosing to embrace the ambiguity here, as this is a much more subtle, affecting read than its face value presentation. I wish I were more confident that read was the work’s intent.