A Plague Tale: Innocence - Dodging Rats and Inquisitors in medieval France

[Burning Bridges]

boring

 

[Ezeekiel]

Looks like journo-bait. Just like Senua's Sacrifice.

 

[ghostdog]

It would probably be better as a simple walking simulator. Linear "stealth" and crate-pushing seems like a very bad way to try and add to the walking simulator formula.

 

[Excommunicator]

Dear Esther was a mildly interesting short story set to a backdrop of an exceptionally pretty environment and great sound design. But it didn't pretend to be more than that.


People were justifiably upset about Dear Esther because of reviewers hyping it. Reviewers calling it a game; a moving, emotional game that was somehow as good or better than something interactive. Which is absurd.

These others are pretending to be fully fledged games and even suggesting they're superior for their disproportionate focus on linear narrative. Which is also absurd.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

These kids look fairly handsome and well nourished for being orphans in plague-ridden medieval Europe.

"...meticulous research"

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

These kids look fairly handsome and well nourished for being orphans in plague-ridden medieval Europe.

"...meticulous research"

Actually, when there's a plague that kills all the hungry mouths, a surplus of food results.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Solid Snail]

Facial animations are MIA for the protagonists, what happened.

 

[toro]

Facial animations are MIA for the protagonists, what happened.

The rats.

 

[Agame]

So this is walking simulator/interactive movie trash?

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/13/a-plague-tale-innocence-review/

Wot I Think - A Plague Tale: Innocence
O' both your houses!

Alice Bell
13th May 2019 / 11:00PM

I am famously not a fan of children in video games, because I think they mostly dead-eyed haunted dolls that are used as cheap, empty receptacles for player empathy. I don’t even like Clementine in The Walking Dead. Yes, I am a monster, etc.

I tell you this so you understand how cute Hugo in A Plague Tale: Innocence must be for me to love him. He is a little stampy only-just-not-a-toddler bundle of wonder. I want to pick him up and pinch his little cheeks.

You play as Hugo’s older sister Amicia, and both of them, the children of a local noble, are cast out alone into the local medieval French countryside to fend for themselves. Their home is attacked by the Inquisition, who are looking for Hugo. Thus the intrigue and danger are introduced to A Plague Tale, a third-person game that combines puzzles, stealth, occasional combat, and rats. Lots of rats.



If you’ve seen anything of Plague Tale, it’ll be the rats. A seething, writhing sea of red eyes and wet squeaking that devours anything fleshy it comes into contact with, but fears light. The Rat Tech on display is really impressive; their little bodies tumble and scramble over one another, somehow moving both independently and as one unit, and the noise they make is grating and loud and horrible. As the waves recede before your torches, they reveal stripped, sticky skeletons or half eaten bodies, like bits of an old ship poking out at low tide. A Plague Tale is pretty goth.

But it does well in that it varies the darker scenes, like a rat-infested moonlight graveyard or a farm surrounded by heaps of pig carcasses, with sunlit moments of respite where you and the characters can all expel their tensely held breaths. The same game can look beautiful and magnetically awful at the same time.



A Plague Tale has a story that’s way more detailed than the escape-to-safety romp I was expecting, involving bloodlines and ancient power, and one extremely evil leader of the Inquisition doing an extremely evil voice. Amicia and Hugo run from the stabby, fanatically religious clutches of the Inquisition into the screeching bitey teeth of the Black Death, with a side excursion into the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, and then back to the Inquisition and plague again. Sometimes all three get combined, and it makes the game an interesting challenge that you can approach in different ways.

Amicia wields a sling, and can collect ingredients to craft alchemical wonders to fling with it. She can light fires, put them out, send the rats in a particular direction with a smelly grenade, get rid of them with a flash of light, throw burning chemical bombs that force soldiers to remove their helmets, or, you know, use regular stones. The stones can kill an enemy without a helmet, but using your sling makes noise. You can also use your person-hands to throw pots or toss stones quietly at metal objects, to draw attention without giving away your position.



Your job is, broadly, to sneak from one side of an area to another, without getting one-hit-killed by grim adults or a horde of rats. Some puzzles only have one solution, but throughout the game there are many areas that present different routes. So do you want to break that guy’s lantern and see him swarmed by the rats, or draw him away so that you can sneak past? And if you do that, will the rats still be blocking your path? Will that other dude see you? Should you sneak around the outside in the tall grass? Juggling all these elements and deciding what to do is a lot of cautious fun, although the UI is tricky to wrangle with a keyboard.

And for a lot of the game you’re making all these considerations with little Hugo in tow, which is why it’s so useful that he’s such a cool, sweet little dude. He whispers “Yes!” or “Not a sound!” when you boost him over a high wall. In one sequence you’re following an aqueduct and he keeps calling it an “acky-duck”. He sees frogs for the first time and flips out. Exploring the map rewards you with collectibles sometimes, but more often than not you get a conversation with Hugo. Amicia makes a pact that if he teaches her about flowers, she’ll teach him how to use her sling. He’s sad that the ducks he sees wild are the same sort that they eat, and Amicia explains that the ducks eat frogs, and it’s just how life works. Their relationship goes from wary to genuine affection, and it’s one of the most special depictions of a sibling relationship I’ve seen in a game.



What surprised me, though, is that for a decent chunk of the game, you’re not with Hugo. Amicia accidentally puts together a sort of rag-tag Goonies gang of lost teens and children who have been orphaned, in one way or another, and Amicia approaches some levels by teaming up with one of them or even sneaking around by herself, while Hugo rests at their makeshift new home. In the game-y bits, you have to solve puzzles that require two people, and so Amicia can direct her teammate towards simple tasks. In the story bits, some relationships in the group feel rushed, especially when compared with Amicia and Hugo, but for the most part the emotional payoffs are earned (and carried very admirably by all the voice actors concerned).

I’ve been very positive about A Plague Tale so far, and it is indeed a good game. After a couple of scenes you’ll notice the same corpse models being reused as rat set dressing, things like that, but those aren’t the sorts of things I care about. What does let A Plague Tale down is three boss fights that interrupt the flow of a game that otherwise seems to have a strong sense of what it is. The first is, I suppose, getting you to understand how to use your sling offensively. The second is, likewise, teaching you a new skill. I can allow these. But the third is just annoying. And, worse, funny! It ends up making the rats, who were previously such a malevolent presence, look silly. Come on, man.

I can’t really explain why without massive spoilers, but I do wish that A Plague Tale had found other methods of communicating these moments to players. Would a nice cutscene or ending sequence, in a game that has good voice acting and strong story sensibilities, have done just as well? Yes, I think it would. But I’ll love Hugo no matter what.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-05-14-a-plague-tale-innocence-review

A Plague Tale: Innocence review - dull stealth almost spoils a tender and ravishing apocalyptic fable
Heart of the swarm.

Children band together against the darkness of a collapsing France in this bleak and beautiful if somewhat rickety medieval fantasy.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
Contributor

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.

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 setting 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 that handful of seconds 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 in seconds, 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 to 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. On one level this represents the game at its most boring, most in hock to genre expectation: workshop benches scattered around levels 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 douse 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 atmosphere and setting. 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 tale in which an older character guides a younger soul whose blood is touched by destiny, but in practice, and for all the absence of chainsaws, it's 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. It's there in the sense of a historical setting (the Sera of Gears is a pastiche of familiar architectural traditions) being softly consumed by the supernatural: the darkness alive with eyeshine, the twisted, bony black rot the rats leave behind them, the alchemical motifs that gradually become the plot's crucible. But above all, it's a question of framing. As in Gears, you spend most chapters wending your way towards some distant landmark, a brooding structure such as a windmill that is teed up for you with a context-sensitive look command, then tugged into and out of view by the intervening geography. It lends each stage of Amicia and Hugo's journey a powerful inexorability, for all the trail-and-error process of bamboozling soldiers - as though you were being drawn through its world by gravity towards a procession of massive objects. It's worth giving into the pull. Just don't forget to look for the flowers.

 

[Tom Selleck]

I'll play this for a bit on YouTube, I think.

 

[toro]

Lirik already finished it in 2 sittings (8 hours !?).

The entire game is a huge scripted corridor. Zero replayability.

 

[Siel]

The game has sub-par gameplay but fucking hell atmosphere is top tier. Will play more to see where it goes.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Gone Home was a mistake.

 

[cretin]

another non game that will sell like hot cakes in the first week due to marketing alone and will convince publishers that more of this shit is a good idea.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

If it didn't have crafting mechanics, I would have been interested in this game.

 

[Frozen]

PC graphics looks worse than console wtf. and I cranked it all up to max.

Its funny how all the people are crying about the dog at the beginning but daddy and mommy gets chopped up by Inquisition and like...who cares lol

 

[RaptorRex888]

Rats, we're rats, we're the rats
We prey at night, we stalk at night, we're the rats
I'm the giant rat that makes all of the rules
Let's see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves

 

[Agame]

Rats, we're rats, we're the rats
We prey at night, we stalk at night, we're the rats
I'm the giant rat that makes all of the rules
Let's see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves

Dude, dont quit your day job.

 

[Belegarsson]

5 hours into the game and I dig it. Pretty perilous and gritty atmosphere with a glimpse of hope, capture very well the feeling of a powerless runaway rabbit. The little kid is small child who never saw the world in front of his eyes before, so while he's annoying for nagging at you for the tiniest things ever, he's also realistic. The dialogue... I don't know, has this straightforward European-y delivery in it? A bit difficult to describe, it reminded me of The Council's various effortlessly written dialogue that serves no purpose other than filling up empty moments.

Gameplay is pretty rudimental, nothing to write home about. Basic stealth, basic distract->sneak->repeat loop. Backdrops make up for it. Early in the game where the sisters have to cross a gigantic dark field full of dead bodies piled up each other, this section is pretty on rail gameplay wise since you only have to light up braziers to scare the rats away and avoid inquisition soldiers, yet it still gave me the chill thanks to the horrific scenery.

 

[Ovg]

It shouldn't be priced at what it is.

Play with French VO

I liked it despite the poor gameplay. Atmosphere is good.

The thief girl was a qt