Do you know what would be a fun topic right now? The Bubonic Plague. Yes, I’m a bit late to the party on A Plague Tale. It was always a game I had planned to make time for but, what with a plague currently sweeping the globe, it seemed like poor timing. Despite all of that, I’m glad I finally did. This heart-wrenching tale of Amicia and Hugo, two siblings forced on the run by the Inquisition amidst a plague riddled France, might have made my top ten in 2019 had I made the time.
A Plague Tale: Innocence (PS4, PC [reviewed], Xbox One)
Developer: Asobo Studios
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Released: May 14, 2019
MSRP: $49.99
As mentioned above, the driving force of A Plague Tale is the relationship between Amicia and her young brother Hugo. At the outset, the children don’t know one another. They grew up in the same place, but Hugo has been mostly kept sequestered by his mother due to a mysterious affliction that she sought to cure him of with alchemy. When the Inquisition lands on your doorstep, Amicia is forced into the role of Hugo’s guardian.
In a lot of ways, this is just one big escort mission. That sentence probably made you groan, and I can’t blame you, but Hugo’s presence rarely feels like a detriment. The small boy holds your hand by default as you guide him through swarms of rats and guard patrols. You can let go and leave Hugo to explore areas unhindered, but leave him for too long, and he’ll start to yell, drawing guards to his location. Hugo can also perform the tasks we’ve come to expect from NPC escort characters. Lift him through a window to open a door latch for you, or have him crawl through a small grate to pull an out of reach lever.
Stealth is critical in the world of A Plague Tale as Amicia has very little at her disposal to dispatch guards with, and any altercation with an enemy results in immediate death. While Amicia is armed with a sling, most guards are wearing helmets, so slinging a rock at their head will only serve to lead them your way. Later in the game, you can craft different projectiles, one of which forces a guard to remove their helmet, opening them up to a lethal hit from a rock. Before that, you’re better off avoiding combat when you can, making noise by hitting shiny objects to cause distractions. As you gather materials in the world you can find workbenches to improves both the effectiveness of your armor and sling, and upgrade item storage overall.
You get a one game-changing ridiculously fun ability later on in the story, but for the sake of spoilers, I won’t say what exactly that power is.
Puzzles are built more often than not around the possibly exaggerated swarms of plague-infested rats. I didn’t live through the black plague, but I don’t remember reading about rat nests bursting from the ground. If you find yourself taken by rats, they’ll kill you and Hugo in a matter of moments; thankfully, these supernatural death rodents can’t stand light. You can pick up torches to safely guide yourself through the oceans of wriggling tails, but these won’t burn for long. Traversing these infested areas typically involves finding an optimal path between braziers, or redirecting beams of light to change the direction of the swarm. Later in the game, you’ll have access to rat clearing projectiles and even ones that draw the creatures in gifting you more opportunity to kill guards with rats.
There are a few boss encounters, but most are designed to slow down combat in such a way that feels counter-intuitive to how the rest of the gameplay works. They’re not particularly challenging, but the brake up the monotony of sneaking around forests and broken down keeps.
The story centers around these siblings learning to trust one another on a journey to escape the Inquisition and the plague alike. Along the way, Amicia and Hugo make several allies who each offer up their own abilities when they occasionally act as in-game companions. It’s a heartfelt journey through a pretty gross world (if you genuinely can’t stand rats maybe skip this one), but character moments feel genuine, and the story gets a bit more supernatural in scope than you might expect.
Verdict: A Plague Tale is a pleasant surprise! A beautiful game filled with a lot of grossness. Character moments make the sometimes ridiculous storytelling shine. Puzzles are fun and inventive, but never particularly challenging.
Buy it
Author: Rich Meister