A PLAGUE TALE: INNOCENCE intends to bring meaning back to death. It tells a familial and grim fairytale of survival set in 14th century, wartime, plague-ridden France. Its premise is as original as its setting and is, for the most part, a success. A Plague Tale: Innocence Review | One player, two characters You play as the young Amicia, a highborn teenage girl who is forced to flee her family estate with her younger brother Hugo due to the English invaders knocking at (down) their gate. Hugo himself is sick with a disease and is generally defenseless to the world. The moment to moment gameplay of A Plague Tale has you navigating through dangerous environments, solving puzzles and hiding from the Inquisition hunting you down. You’re armed only with a slingshot which, after a bit of wind up time, can be used to break locks, lamps and the unprotected heads of enemy soldiers. If they’re wearing an armored helmet, things become a bit more complicated. If an enemy spots you and gets within melee range, you’re dead. If that enemy has a ranged weapon? You’re dead. Your objective is to progress, not to kill, sometimes the best strategy is to avoid bloodshed. Sometimes. A Plague Tale is a stealth and puzzle game where face-to-face confrontation never ends well. A Plague Tale: Innocence Review | Quiet as a rat The stealth itself is simple and intuitive. Avoid the light and move through tall grass to remain hidden, throw bottles and rocks to distract guards, etc. It does the job and it’s always clear what you can and cannot get away with. While a wholly linear game, aside from an alley or two to explore, most enemy encounters or scenarios are open questions allowing the player to answer in a number of different ways. A knight blocks your route, what do you do? Knock out a lamp allowing the nearby rat swarm to deal with him? Sneak up behind the guy and suffocate them with a specially crafted and valuable powder? Or just cause a distraction with a bottle, moving him out of your path unharmed? A Plague Tale has an almost oxymoronic design, balancing player freedom inside its linear nature. The game’s big stars are the aforementioned legion of rats infesting France. They will consume everything and anything, living or dead, the only thing they don’t like, is light. Light is the only place you are safe. Throughout the game your relationship with the deadly creatures changes as you learn to understand their behavior. They’re simultaneously the biggest obstacle in your path and the greatest tool in your arsenal, after hours of dealing with them, when you feel most sure of your control the rule book is kicked out the door. It’s a dangerous world and things are always changing. A Plague Tale: Innocence Review | Fight or flight There’s an incredibly interesting dynamic at play between the main character Amicia, you the player, and your shared vulnerability to the game’s world. Every foe you encounter is stronger than you. Amicia does not have the power or experience to fight them, after all before now she would never have dreamed of killing another person. It’s hardly the first game that runs on the narrative of “Innocent character must grow and learn to survive” and usually after the first 30 minutes this thread swiftly comes to an end because you’re given two automatic weapons and a shotgun (Tomb Raider reboot). But A Plague Tale is a narrative driven game, much of its appeal, and success, is reliant on this parallel relationship between the player and Amicia to carry it through to the end credits. Fortunately, it handles this brilliantly. While you do unlock various different craftable items you can use throughout the game, you’re never given the power to run around with abandon. You’re always just a young girl against an army, your Video Game Protagonist status is kept in check. The only way to survive is to outsmart them. Sometimes you’ll fail, but the checkpoint system will ensure you’ll never lose more than a minute or two of progress. A Plague Tale: Innocence Review | Layers of beauty As these screenshots show, A Plague Tale is a rich and beautiful game. Different chapters feature distinct color palettes, from the openings crisp colors of Autumn to the dark muddy nights and the first snowfall on a winter’s morning, the environments and weather are varied and ensure the darkest moments still instill dread right up to the finale. There are moments throughout the game, where the sight before you, combined with Olivier Deriviere’s (Vampyr) score stops you in your tracks. A wondrous sight of a dilapidated castle on the horizon behind a curtain of the rain, or emerging over a hill’s peak and seeing the horrible aftermath of a tremendous battle, thousands of unidentifiable corpses making it impossible to discern the winner outside of the rats. And it’s these moments, as Amicia leads her younger brother by the hand, that will stick with you. A Plague Tale: Innocence Review | Lost in complication A Plague Tale‘s bigger pitfall is when it tries too much, and moves from a personal story into a grand tale of alchemy, religious fanatics, conspiracy and repeating ancient history. The game is at its best when characters are trading words back and forth as they help one another complete a puzzle or sneak their way through a camp. When the young cast share in one another’s fears, confide and try to reassure each other while nearby rats devour a soldier’s corpse accompanied by a long, haunting, cello note. In these moments the atmosphere is phenomenal, everything that does help build towards this is unnecessary noise. It’s a shame that so much time and attention is wasted on the grand plot when the simpler, more human tale is its true strength. You’re invested in the characters who have been thrust into the cruel world of adults and war. You’re invested in how Amicia is coping with the sins she had to commit in order to survive and to protect her family. You’re invested in how she tries to explain all of this to Hugo and create a new life. This is great. But don’t expect people to then care about what the pope and a bishop are up to halfway into the game. Your focus ends up getting spread too thin, and the game suffers for it, you don’t get the emotional pay off the game had been building towards because it’s more interested in tying up an unnecessary plot thread. A Plague Tale tells a tale about human cruelty, the loss of innocence, survival, and family via its beautiful visual and imaginative level design, but it feels like near the game’s end confidence was lost in this vision. It gets in its own way by deciding that something bigger was needed to keep the player’s attention. It’s a sour end to an otherwise great game. GameRevolution reviewed A Plague Tale: Innocence with a copy provided by the publisher.<doc-sep>If cleanliness is close to godliness then the people of A Plague Tale’s 14th century France must be halfway to heaven. Far from the stinking peasants of Monty Python, they surround themselves with soap and wash in deep wooden baths, the kind Geralt likes, hoping to protect themselves from the encroaching stench of death. They’re ahead of their time – researchers now reckon the bubonic plague spread from person to person, not through rats, and that our furry friends have been unfairly maligned. But unfortunately for these peasants, they’re also living in the wrong universe. A Plague Tale: Innocence is an authentic-feeling but not strictly historical action-adventure take on what it’d be like to be born in the unluckiest generation, and here it’s the rat’s bite you’ve got to worry about. Worse than that, the rats don’t stop after the first mouthful – arriving in terrifying throngs to reduce their victims to bloody pulps. On top of it all, the English are invading, and the Inquisition are riding around in carriages sticking swords through people for reasons they keep to themselves. They’re information hoarders in plate mail, and far beyond the reach of Marie Kondo. The needle you steer through this rich, red tapestry is Amicia, teenage daughter in a wealthy family. Insulated from the hell outside, she’s instead been shaped by the father who taught her to use a sling – thankfully, since it’s the game’s only weapon. Her mother is a resourceful but distant figure, hardened by the ordeal of caring for Amicia’s younger brother, Hugo, who has been quarantined his entire young life due to a mysterious illness. The two siblings are essentially strangers until they’re both thrown from their walled bubble in the prologue. It’s their innocence the title concerns, and it takes a battering as the pair navigate a world they’ve never seen, trying to avoid the awful fates that await displaced children during war. If it feels like I’m spending a lot of time digging into A Plague Tale’s characters, that’s a focus reflected in the game itself. Everything that happens is in service to the two children at its core, pushing them onward or changing them in some way. The camera hugs Amicia close in third-person, and pushes closer still during cutscenes, so that we can see the impact of the horrors she’s witnessed ripple across her face. “Try not to look,” Amicia tells Hugo, but it’s not a protection she offers herself. For an idea of how A Plague Tale plays, think Naughty Dog – a little of the elaborate traps and spectacle of Uncharted, and a lot of the scrap-gathering and stealth-murder in The Last of Us. In fact, practically all of A Plague Tale’s mechanics have a parallel in one or other of those games. Even the rats, who fear fire and must be beaten back with torches as if parting the seas, have precedent in Uncharted 3’s tomb spiders. For the most part, that’s not really a criticism. Bordeaux’s Asobo Studio, which until now has worked predominantly on Disney film adaptations, has done a remarkable job of mimicking the flair of its inspirations. But it makes no advancements either, and takes on some of the more tired elements of action-adventure it could’ve done without. This is a game in which you spend a lot of time a) pulling a lever while an NPC turns a crank, b) boosting an NPC up a ledge, c) tapping a button to help an NPC open a heavy door, or d) shooting a rope to knock down a bridge or brazier. It’s rarely challenging, and in A Plague Tale’s worst moments you can see what needs to be done five steps ahead, leaving you to press the rote buttons and hear the dialogue unfold. Your mileage may vary – just know you’ll be stopping every one of those miles to help Hugo over a wall by pressing A. It helps that the NPCs you’ll be tapping buttons with are wonderful company. Over the course of Amicia and Hugo’s misadventures you’ll pick up a gaggle of teenage companions, giving the game the air of a grimdark Enid Blyton or CS Lewis story. A highlight is the thief and runaway Melie – acutely aware that Amicia has existed on a different plane of privilege until now, and always ready to remind her of it. Then there’s Lucas, your connection to the Middle Ages art of alchemy, an apprentice who is kind and well-mannered but a little overeducated. When he gets carried away looking for a Gandalf-style glowing doorway to an alchemist’s hideout, it’s Melie who reminds him to “use your eyes before using your mouth” – revealing the perfectly ordinary passage behind an overgrown shrub. Gradually, the interplay between these characters becomes something you look forward to – more so than the next upgrade to your sling or alchemical ammo. That ammo is the way you make a path through A Plague Tale’s levels, either by burning the helmet off the face of a soldier so that you can deck them with a rock, or lighting a strange substance and letting it fizz away on the ground, budging the rats which cover every surface. It’s best to think of the rats not as individual monsters but as a sentient liquid, spreading towards sources of food and receding away from the light. They’re lethal to the touch, but like any liquid can be redirected. Often the game sets you adrift on an ocean of writhing rodents, and you’ll have to plan a way from one patch of light to the next, not knowing where your next raft will come from. These scenes tend to provide A Plague Tale with its most shocking spectacle, recalling the hordes of both Days Gone and World War Z. Truly, this is the year of the impressively clumped enemy. A Plague Tale is a beautiful game all over, though. It’s sometimes difficult to believe it didn’t come from one of the established development houses of Sony or Ubisoft. Games as grim as this one tend to slip into an icky red-brown palette and stay there, but here you’ll find constant colour and variety. There’s gratuity, yes, and Asobo tends to amplify the scale for those moments – with heaped piles of slaughtered cows and Stranger Things-esque journeys into underground nests built from sinew and skeleton. But there are also mossy watermills in the woods, moon-lit puddles in the town square, and a yawning, rain-slick castle open to the elements. The story returns to that last one as it shifts through the seasons, sieving snow onto the craggy ramparts, which look over leagues of French forest. It’s a world that feels like one. Despite the fantasy – the rats a metaphor for the invisible spread of the disease – A Plague Tale plays the 1300s completely straight, with none of the hey-nonny nonsense you might be used to in RPGs that feed on European history. And it works. The horror, gore and screaming strings of the score are kept in check by Hugo. Much of the game is, essentially, one long escort mission, and the fact that’s nowhere near as frustrating as it sounds is down in large part to the little guy at its centre – a sweet boy who holds your hand and steers you unerringly towards the good in the world, especially the animals. At one point he offers a pig his condolences for what’s happened to his friends. Nobody in this story is allowed to keep their innocence, but there’s still room for Hugo’s good-natured curiosity. It’s just a shame that Good-Natured Curiosity makes for a shit subtitle. There’s a lot lifted from other games in A Plague Tale, but somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. This is a full-hearted reach for the big time of AAA storytelling that succeeds in the most important departments, thanks to its sparkling polish and subtle characterisation. It’s one of a handful of games for which I could tell you the personality traits and motivations of not just the protagonists, but four or five secondary characters.<doc-sep>Children struggling to right a world wrecked by the old is a popular theme nowadays, within video games and beyond them. Asobo's often-magnificent A Plague Tale: Innocence is one of the more hopeful variations, pitching a small cast of photogenic youngsters against religious zealots and man-eating rats in medieval France. Though let down by an over-reliance on mandatory stealth, which drains a little of the sorcery from some astounding locations, it is a wonderfully dark and tender fairytale whose key draws are its frail but indefatigable protagonists. A Plague Tale: Innocence review Developer: Asobo Asobo Publisher: Focus Home Interactive Focus Home Interactive Platform played: PS4 PS4 Availability: Out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One As the curtain goes up, noble-born siblings Amicia and Hugo are chased from their family estate by Inquisition soldiers, leaving their parents for dead. The two are relative strangers to one another: the victim of a hereditary sickness, which slowly blackens his veins over the game's 10 hour story, Hugo has spent his whole life locked away in a loft with his mother, a master alchemist. This affliction is the reason for the Inquisition's raid, and you'll spend much of the plot unravelling its arcane origin. The older Amicia - the character you control for most of the game - has grown up in her father's company and is a spirited creature of the outdoors: when we first meet her, she's learning to hunt with her sling. Their home's destruction throws them together for the first time, much as the death of Faye does Atreus and Kratos in God of War, and as in Santa Monica Studio's game, the story marches to the gentle beat of their growing intimacy. Hugo is often a source of frustration for Amicia, stuffing his hands gleefully into baskets of putrid fruit in deserted villages, and wailing in panic if she tries to explore without him. But his hard-wearing childishness in the face of incessant horror is also her greatest consolation, the thing anchoring her to herself as she does what is necessary for them both to survive. One of the game's loveliest explorations of this takes the unlikely form of a collectible, where Hugo gathers flowers he recognises from their mother's books, inviting his bedraggled and bloodied sister to stoop so that he can plait them into her hair. The flower stays in Amicia's hair for the rest of the chapter, even as you fell pursuing soldiers with your slingshot or shatter their lanterns to expose them to the rats. It's a gesture that says everything about who Amicia and Hugo are to one another, what they've lost and what they've held onto - and tracking down those blossoms quickly became as important to me as mastering the game's slightly wayward mixture of stealth and terrain puzzles. The ruined lustre of its environments and the sheer adorableness of its characters notwithstanding, A Plague Tale doesn't begin well. It consists, at first, of all the palate-cleansing stealth bits you wish they'd edit out of third-person shooters. The journey across France takes you to a variety of beautifully imagined places - battlefields checkered with trampled ensigns, moonlit cities on loan from Bloodborne - but many of them boil down to pockets of short-sighted soldiers, all trundling around their patrol paths, all talking loudly to each other or themselves. Playing as Amicia, with Hugo holding your hand (you can order him to let go where necessary with the D-pad), you lurk behind upended wagons or in patches of vegetation, waiting for the point in the pattern when every guard has their back to you. You can also lob rocks at crates of armour and smash pots to lure guards away for the genre-required 10 seconds or so of theatrical head-scratching. Getting caught is typically a recipe for death - Amicia can down unhelmeted opponents with her sling, and break line of sight to reset guard awareness, but unless you have a certain item in your inventory, she's toast the second anybody saunters within swinging distance. It's all rather uninspired next to the melancholy majesty of the setting and the delicacy of the game's incidental dialogue (my tip: pick the French language option - the French-accented English one is fine but a bit Monty Python in places). Worse still are the "big action beats" that conclude some levels - ungainly boss fights in which you circle-strafe while aiming for weakpoints, hold-the-button chase sequences or mercifully brief shooting galleries. The overall feel, for the first few hours, is of a well-wrought and affecting story in thrall to extremely worn-out genre conventions. Fortunately, there's more to A Plague Tale than sliding between viewcones and counting the beats till an unsympathetic man with a spear looks away. There's the rat horde, first of all, a ravenous tidal entity that explodes through soil and masonry like pressurised oil. The rats will strip the flesh from anything they come across, armour or no armour, but can be kept at bay with light. Accordingly, while dodging Inquisition troops you'll need to attend Thief-style to the play of illumination across each area. You'll use quick-burning branches to force a path through them, the ocean of rodent bodies closing back in behind you as the flame creeps down towards Amicia's fist. Where torches are scarce you'll manipulate parts of the environment, putting your shoulder to a brazier or hauling on a ballista crank to send its burning projectile swinging out towards an object you need. You'll also look for things the rats can scrunch on in place of Amicia and Hugo, from animal carcasses and corpses strung up by your enemies to your enemies themselves. All this changes the feel of the game, from workmanlike sneakery to a gruesome, on-going question of just how awfully you want to treat those hunting for you, with Hugo looking on. I don't think the rat horde concept is quite explored to the full - in the last third, there's a definite sense that the scenario designers have run out of steam - but there are some opulent environment puzzles to chew on, particularly once Amicia and Hugo team up with other characters who have a certain degree of autonomy. The most decadent takes the form of a giant clockwork castle made up of braziers on tracks: to purge the place of scurrying threats, you must work alongside a sour-mouthed thief, moving each brazier one by one to gain access to another. The other way A Plague Tale grows is in the familiar form of equipment progression. In some respects this represents the game at its most boring, most in hock to genre expectation: workshop benches scattered around chapters let you plug craftable resources into a bevy of iterative improvements, like being able to sling objects without making a noise. More intriguing, though, are the alchemical recipes bestowed on you by some of the people you'll befriend (who have signature abilities of their own you can call on at intervals). These include mixtures that douse torches or kindle embers, and foul-smelling concoctions with which to choke out armoured adversaries, forcing them to remove their helmets. These gadgets are hardly without precedent, and none of the puzzles tethered to them are breathtaking, but they help Plague Tale step away from its clunkier underpinning and make the most of its gorgeous, horrendous locales. There's a marvelous, if slightly rough-hewn additional set of abilities and puzzle considerations towards the end of the game, which expose another side to the rodent plague - I won't spoil them, but suffice to say it's worth the journey. The great shock of Plague Tale is that on some level, it's a Gears of War game. The more obvious comparison is The Last of Us, another poignant, apocalyptic escapade in which an older character guides a more innocent soul whose blood is touched by destiny, but in practice, and for all the absence of chainsaws, it's often Epic's game that comes to mind. It's there in the tanky handling, with characters swivelling ponderously as though secretly many times their own size.<doc-sep>
Though there is no shortage of stealth games in the gaming industry, it's rare to find one that has a story that grabs and holds the player. A Plague Tale: Innocence, a new historically-inspired title set in France during the spread of the Black Plague and in the midst of the Hundred Years' War, is one of those rare titles. The game's superb narrative stands out against most other stealth titles like a shining beacon, and this, alongside the fantastic gameplay design and gorgeous visuals and music, solidifies A Plague Tale: Innocence as one of 2019's best gaming experiences. Family first A Plague Tale: Innocence Trying to live in a dying world A Plague Tale: Innocence is a superb stealth adventure with excellent gameplay, gorgeous presentation, and a fantastic story that shows how the worst of what the world can throw at humanity can bring out the worst of it. $39 at GMG (Steam) $50 at Microsoft Brother and sister against the world At its core, A Plague Tale: Innocence is a story about a brother and sister named Hugo and Amicia clinging to each other in order to survive the perils of 1349 France, which include the invading English army, swarms of rats carrying the Black Plague, and most sinister of all, a mysterious cult called the Inquisition, which broke off from the rest of Christian authority in order to pursue a cure for the disease in ethically disturbing ways. Amicia is only a young teenager and Hugo is just a child afflicted with a dangerous condition, so as you'd expect, trying to make it through these horrors all on their own is extremely traumatic for both of them. As Hugo emotionally struggles to cope with what he's forced to see, Amicia desperately tries to do her best to protect him, all while emotionally struggling herself. To say that A Plague Tale: Innocence is 'heartbreaking' would be an understatement. To say that A Plague Tale: Innocence is 'heartbreaking' would be an understatement. To make things worse for the two of them, the Inquisition wants to find Hugo and capture him, thinking his mysterious condition may be related to a cure for the plague. As Amicia and Hugo try to evade them and the disease-carrying rats, poor Amicia is forced to do things that would leave people scarred for life. This ranges from simply killing people outright to tricking them into getting eaten alive by rats, just so she and Hugo can avoid capture. And as the Inquisition keeps chasing them, she's forced to do things like this more and more frequently. This narrative, though, isn't hopeless. While the terrors that Amicia and Hugo are subjected to are undeniably awful, the bond that they form by relying on each other for survival forms a ray of sunshine amidst the bleakness. Where the Inquisition represents how horrific events like war and a plague outbreak can bring out the worst in people, Amicia and Hugo represent how love, compassion, and empathy can bring out the best in us, even through extreme trauma. This is the core theme of A Plague Tale: Innocence's story, and it's a story that was executed excellently. While I have a few issues with how some of the story's side characters are handled towards the conclusion of the narrative, the game's writing overall is nothing short of fantastic. A perfect blend Gameplay wise, A Plague Tale: Innocence is a satisfying blend of stealth and puzzle gameplay, with horror elements seasoned throughout. For most of the game, you'll be staying hidden from enemies by staying low and distracting them by using Amicia's sling to make distracting noises. This classic stealth formula of watching patrol patterns and then either sneaking through them when you see an opening or creating one yourself with a distraction isn't unique, but it's well done, with the stealth segments towards the latter half of the game in particular standing out as superb. Since Amicia dies in one hit, fighting is ill-advised, but there are times where you have to. In those moments, you have to rely on some tools in order to survive. One example of these is a special knockout drug that can be used to stealthily take out a foe. Another is a corrosive mixture that can be thrown at an armored enemy's head to make his helmet burn his skin, making him throw it off. This leaves him exposed for a lethal headshot with a rock from Amicia's sling.