Time Extend
How killer rodents helped us see the light
Why rat-infested A Plague Tale: Innocence is a real work of class in more ways than one
Developer Asobo Studio Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2019
There’s a scene in A Plague Tale that’s truly a picture of innocence. Perhaps the only one. Two teens, highborn protagonist Amicia and poor thief Melie, work to liberate an abandoned castle from swarms of killer rats, guiding them into pits with flaming braziers. As Amicia strains to lever the metal contraptions, she imagines herself an Amazon warrior, and narrates a battle against invading hordes. Melie resists the charade – she’s the game’s modern conscience, cynical, wary of status – but then begins to embellish the fantasy herself. In that moment they forget who they are. They’re just two children playing.
Titles stapled together with a colon often feel unwieldy, but A Plague Tale justifies its subtitle. It’s the thematic glue that binds the adventure together, and makes it sticky. Yes, this is a tale of kids thrust into a diseased adult world, fighting to restore an innocence lost. But it’s also something darker, about how thin the veneer of innocence is, and how it may rest on stubborn blindness to injustice and suffering. Innocence, this tale suggests, isn’t so much a gift of childhood as of privilege, rendered hollow by an unseen human cost.
Amicia de Rune and her five-year-old brother Hugo, sheltered offspring of a 14th-century French lord, are ideal specimens to convey such ideas. Amicia is carefree and curious, treating life as an adventure, only complaining that she doesn’t see her parents much. Her mother, in particular, is occupied with Hugo, the boy afflicted with an unnamed condition that keeps him confined to his quarters.
The idyll doesn’t last. When murderous Inquisition knights penetrate the de Rune estate, Amicia and Hugo are forced to flee, leaving their parents for dead. The pair barely know each other, let alone the land beyond their cosy bubble. Amicia is frantically resourceful. Hugo is panicky and prone to headaches. He’s smart and wellspoken, but ignorant of social rules. He knows a lot about flowers. He doesn’t know if you’re allowed to pick an apple from a tree.
Their journey attracts other youngsters, like a desperate Katamari glomming together social leftovers. There’s Lucas, an alchemist’s apprentice, who furnishes you with weaponised chemical compounds. There’s Melie and her twin, Arthur, found looting corpses on an exhausted battlefield. And Rodric, a beefy blacksmith’s son, adrift since the Inquisition murdered his father.
Aristocrats, a scholar, a tradesman, vagabonds – a full class spectrum for the narrative to play with. They’re free from concerns of social status, but habits die hard. Amicia’s noble cause takes precedence by default, the new boys automatically falling into line. Arthur wants to impress her and Rodric acts as hired muscle, while Lucas dutifully attends Hugo’s medical needs. Melie is the sharp one who spies the unspoken hierarchy in the makeshift team.
A Plague Tale tangles its strong undercurrent of assumed privilege with our expectations as players. We’re used to the privilege of the lead role, often playing as some kind of chosen one with special powers whose life simply matters more than anyone else’s. We appreciate our NPC allies, but they’re disposable (with regret) if it comes to it, while the fates of our enemies warrant barely a moment’s thought.
As Amicia and Hugo sneak from their home, they see their faithful servants being slaughtered. It’s horrifying, but useful for a silent getaway, as the help entertain Inquisition swords with their torsos and throats. Later, on that battlefield, strewn with Anglo-French decay, the children walk over bodies and forget to register anything but disgust. On finding that abandoned castle, it feels like the new home they deserve, worth fixing up for as long as it’s fun. At each turn, we share their sentiments.
Everything about A Plague Tale speaks of class contrast, even its own position in game publishing’s caste system. It’s no indie pauper by any means, but less lavish than the peers that inspire it – notably The Last Of Us, with its tell-tale cover furniture, pushable crates and upgrade benches. As a petit-bourgeois trier, it’s destined for scant attention next to genre royalty. And yet, unconstrained by the pressures of extraordinary wealth, its lean flexibility makes it worth a look.
It certainly presents itself with an air of quality. There’s a spark in the eyes of its
characters, alongside immaculately blushed skin and wispy hair. Its medieval brick houses and farmyard huts are beautifully decorated with spattered mud and blackened apples. Assuredly childlike voiceovers avoid the comic pitfalls of French-accented English. Olivier Derivière’s menacing score stabs drama into proceedings.
The frame underneath is a little more rudimentary, but as more opulent games sag decadently, A Plague Tale stays focused. Mechanics are mechanical. The vulnerable Hugo is reined in by Amicia’s firm grip, only unlatching when the coast is clear. Blankets of rats react obediently to flame or flesh. Blinkered guards march clockwork routes, easily diverted by sounds and ready to bow down dead as required. It’s all geared to grease the delivery of TV-length episodes. Workmanlike? Yes. It gets the job done.
The one procedural flourish is the plague itself, the rats, an insatiable ocean of chittering grey, spilling over unlit ground. Their presence remains unnerving after you learn to exploit their photophobia, even in a late twist that sees you wade through the multitude unharmed. This horror brings innocence into focus ready for dissection, right from the opening chapter, as Amicia, her father and dog, Lion, hunt in a sunlit forest. A peaceful scene. Joyful. Innocent? When Lion is dragged underground by the unseen predators, Amicia’s idyll is shattered.
As the tale unfurls, we learn that this supernatural infestation is linked to Hugo’s condition. The naïve, sheltered youngster has an ancient gift/curse of affinity to rodents that is expressed in the family bloodline every handful of centuries. What does this symbolise if not some kind of rot in the core of hereditary nobility? The rats aren’t the cause, they’re the symptom, arriving to squeak the death of innocence amid France’s poverty and sickness.
Sure, the plague is a great leveller, munching through townhouses as much as monasteries and peasant holdings. But, as always, those with power seek to turn crisis into opportunity. The Grand Inquisitor wants Hugo’s blood so he can access the gift himself, and in the battle for status the poor will pay the greatest price.
A Plague Tale isn’t so crass as to imply that Hugo and Amicia are responsible for social disparity. Instead it traces a thin line between oblivious advantage and treading on others by convention, and starting to enjoy it. Like many stealth games, it can only keep its heroes on the defensive for so long, squatting in tall grass and smashing diversionary pots. Eventually it has to resort to violence. And it seems fitting, even once the body count exceeds plausibility.
Amicia’s skill with a sling would put David to shame. In a game of unfussy rules, lethal headshots are easy to pinpoint. First it’s a slow drip, starting deep into chapter two. A peasant wielding a sickle. Nowhere to
THE ONE PROCEDURAL FLOURISH IS
THE PLAGUE ITSELF, THE RATS, AN
INSATIABLE OCEAN OF CHITTERING GREY
run. Do or die. The kill leaves Amicia shaken. Then another, an armoured, griefstricken father, convinced she and Hugo are the cause of the plague. “Don’t make me do this,” Amicia screams.
That’s all for a time, as attention shifts towards the rats. But the floodgates will open. A few chapters later you stall on a grisly realisation, faced with helmeted soldiers carrying lanterns to ward off the rodents. Slingshot smashes lantern, and the swarm rushes in to devour its prey. “It’s horrible,” Amicia says, but she’s hardening. Soon she’ll be rampaging through an English military camp, cracking skulls with a quip.
Later, armed with explosives, corrosives and rat attractants, Amicia improvises dozens of kills. An absurd escalation, yet one befitting her status. She shifts from cowering to destroying, lighting fires to putting them out, shooing rats away to directing their lethal fury. She takes back control as nobles like she and Hugo are supposed to, raining retribution on peasants and military conscripts. They’re rarely guilty of more than acting on startled instinct, or begrudgingly following orders. But they should know their place, at the bottom of the digital food chain.
It’s Hugo, the male heir, who finally wields the most terrifying power, surrounding himself with vermin that bend to his will. He’ll use that ability to extinguish the Inquisition, before mercifully banishing the plague. By then, Arthur and Rodric are dead, having sacrificed themselves for the cause. Or, more accurately, for Amicia. The de Rune kids reunite with their mother and depart with Lucas to seek a new home. Riding a hired carriage, Amicia and Hugo return to playful exuberance, their performed innocence once again blocking out the country around them.
Most telling of all is the absence in this final scene: Melie. Her brother gone, she opts for self-reliance rather than playing castles with the de Runes. Hugo believes it’s because she’s afraid of his power. But perhaps that’s not what most worries her. She would have noted the casualties – Arthur and Rodric, working-class expendables – and understood that she would be the next noble sacrifice. Melie’s bond with Amicia could only bloom amid the postponement of status in that ruined castle. A brief moment of innocence buried forever by the return of normality.