A Plague Tale: Innocence
Family matters in A PLAGUE TALE: I NNOCENCE
The most doomed thing you can be in a videogame is a tutorial dad. If you’re a father reading this and you’ve recently taught your child how to shoot apples or duck under fallen logs, take out life insurance immediately—you’re never making it into act two. This is how A Plague Tale begins, and, unfortunately, for the first hour, it feels cloyingly familiar. You watch your family get butchered. The baddies are cartoonishly bad. And you can only escape by scampering around the Inquisition’s inept search team.
It’s a shaky start, and one that highlights the game’s absurd stealth mechanics. Three people can become invisible by squatting in a thicket mere inches away from the elite soldier hunting them. Once you get over that, however, A Plague Tale clicks. There are a few reasons for this. The first is the two lead characters: Amicia is bold, believable, and just helpless enough for you to feel in genuine peril. And her brother, Hugo, who could have been an intolerable nuisance, turns out to be rather charming. Nothing indicates a decent upbringing like the ability to remain impossibly polite when rats are trying to devour your eyes. I admire the developer’s belief in the world, too. In the wrong hands, 14th century France might have felt like edutainment—and when we want that we go to Total War, not thirdperson action games. But in A Plague Tale it feels like a holiday from edgy sci-fi or bleak fantasy. And then we have the rats! The lovely rats. What felt like a gimmick upon release now feels like a way of providing welcome variety. In another universe this is a Warhammer game in which you escape skaven slavers, but A Plague Tale is a solid alternative.
72