République: Episode 3 - Ones and Zeroes

Ones and Zeroes is the third episode of République, a crowd funded stealth game released in episodic format. It is acquired as an in-app purchase and requires the previous two episodes to play. It starts right away from the end of the second episode, when Hope reaches the elevator that can take her to the surface. It is however permanently protected by two guards. She needs a way to get rid of them as well as a keycard to operate the elevator. Just like the previous episodes a lot of background information is revealed by scanning intel. This time it focuses mostly on revealing more about The Arrival, a focal point as République's "Arrival" as a world superpower, as well as how people are all over the world were recruited to become Prizrak. In this episode Hope also needs the help of Mattie Sade, who runs The Morning Bell, the propaganda newspaper and online media of the République and it is not clear where her allegiances lie. Most of the game takes place in a new location around heavily guarded servers and various rooms connected to it. As it ties into the previous episode with the Metroidvania concept, it is possible to return to any location from the previous episodes as well.

The basic gameplay is identical to the previous episodes. The player does not control Hope directly, but instead she contacts the player through her phone. Cameras and hacking skills are then used to guide her around. The OMNI View interface can be upgraded to level four in this episode, providing new rooms to access, as well as certain locations from the previous episodes. This episodes has larger rooms more densely populated with guards, requiring more preparation to move through them. Certain guards can resist the taser, the pepper spray or both, and require a different approach. The Data Broker offers one new ability, Delay, used to scramble the Prizrak's radio communications for a short time so they cannot call for help. A new item is introduced, the sleep mine, to permanently disable any guard.

Typical game elements that return are the collectibles (intelligence, banned books, game cartridges and Zager tapes). Working together with Mattie and accessing the main servers to the outside world, Hope can use a new mechanic to hack into any computer worldwide (but also on the local network), taking over the computers and the cameras there to collect evidence. This is used to gather information to create fabricated stories about the Prizrak to get them arrested. Hope gets to design articles by combining incriminating soundbites, photographs, video and quotes into articles, which can then be published. This affects the guards in the world, but the process is largely linear and it cannot be done to any Prizrak.