If I told you that Robinson's Requiem was a first-person adventure game with 3D movement, would you be excited?  Would you rush out and buy a copy because you'd never played anything like that before?  Of course not.  We're all DOOMheads now, and there's no reason to deny it.  New games are expected to meet or beat the standards that Wolfenstein and Doom set.  They are the yardsticks.

	There's even an argument to be made that games of this type are becoming boring.  That's right...BORING.  Could we have reached this point so quickly?  Could we, after only eight months of DOOM-ful game-playing splendor, be fed up with its revolutionary movement engine?  Absolutely.  It's time for the next thing...whatever the next thing may be.  Now, having stated my opinion, and at the same time having set myself up for a letter-bombing from loyal DOOM fans, I will now try to give as objective a preview as possible to Readysoft's new game.

	Robinson's Requiem looks pretty darn cool right from the opening cinematics.  The first thing I saw was a mini-movie of a ship crashing onto a primitive world ... complete with pterodactyls and prehistoric vegetation.  The object of the game is to find a way off the planet, which seems like a pretty daunting task considering you have only a mini-computer and some clothing to start.

	Don't think you can breeze through this game just because you beat DOOM in an afternoon.  The only obvious similarity between the two games is the first-person perspective.  After that, Requiem's interface is quite original ... and good.  It utilizes the same basic commands that most adventure games contain.  Eating, sleeping, attacking, picking up, etc., are all here, and are all represented by icons on a vertical bar.  This bar is always onscreen, so you can basically do anything from anywhere.

	Among the not-so-common features also included are automapping and first aid.  There aren't any healing spells here, and sleeping won't bring your hit points back up, so the first aid feature is the only real way to improve your health.  You'll discover that you'll need it often, because the greatest challenge I discovered in Requiem was avoiding injury.  There are more ways to get hurt in this game than there are calories in a Big Mac.  Enemy monsters are the least of your problems, and I mean that literally.  I didn't experience a lot of combat, but I did fall off cliffs a lot, and had to restore my game 20,000 times because of food poisoning.  I hope this isn't getting too deep for you DOOM fans..I mean,.all you've had to deal with are fireballs and demonspawn.  This game has infections, for Pete's sake.

	Yeah, staying alive certainly is tricky in Requiem.  The movement system is a bit unorthodox. Moving the mouse causes the cursor to move instead of your character.  To actually put one foot in front of the other, you must click on arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen.  This tends to limit freedom of movement, especially since Requiem's realistic terrain includes caverns and mountains which require precision maneuvering.  It's easy to get stuck, but some narrow gaps can be traversed by crawling, which is another innovative feature found here.

	In addition to standard inventory items such as food and weapons, your character can also carry homemade items.  After finding two or more items which can be used together ... for instance,.needle, thread, and animal hide, your character can use the "build" icon to create a new item ... in this case, a leather tunic.  I didn't get to fully experiment with this feature, but you can imagine the many possible combinations.  I wish you could create a sterilizer, because almost every piece of food I could find caused Robinson to convulse and die upon eating it.

	The landscapes in Requiem are very nicely drawn.  Objects become heavily pixelated when you move close to them, but that's nothing new.  The fact that I wandered around so much to see these landscapes should tell you something, though.  The lack of other human beings to converse with, coupled with a very vague objective, makes for a confusing game.  I've never played a game in which I had so little of an idea of what I was supposed to do.  This isn't really bad, and probably is exactly what Silmarils (the progamming squad behind Requiem) had in mind.  There's no doubt that anyone who likes a challenging adventure game will dig Robinson's Requiem.  It's easy to play and a joy to look at, but it'll probably stump nine out of 10 people early on.  This ain't no DOOM, folks.  It's for gamers who need something more than a quick adrenaline rush.