A Plague Tale: Innocence Gets Better and Better | Video Game Review
The big selling point with this game–the thing you’ve probably heard about if you’ve heard anything–is that thousands of rats are animated simultaneously without any frame rate compromises. Sure, that’s impressive from a technical perspective, but it’s concerning from a future of the human race perspective. You people realize that 50 years ago we flew to the damn moon, right?!
The rat hoard animations are incredible (sorry moon guys), but that’s not what turned out to be the most impressive part of the game, thankfully. I’m not dismissing the allure of a rat frenzy simulator, but at the same time I do doubt its mass appeal. I hope it doesn’t have mass appeal.
I’m most impressed by the game’s relentless refusal to rest on those creepy rat nest laurels. At every step the game elevates itself above what you’ve heretofore come to expect the game to be. You start off throwing rocks, then your dog gets eaten. Then you are solving minor environmental puzzles. Then you’re introduced to your distant younger brother, then your parents die, soldiers attack, rats attack, and the game never stops ratcheting up the tension.
The game simply never gets stale despite it’s simple mechanics: sneak around, avoid detection, solve puzzles, reach the end. Sounds pretty direct. But the game never settles. The environments are constantly changing. The enemies evolve. The tools at your disposal vary to match the ever-changing puzzles.
While the game’s initial draw will be, for most people, the viscerality of the rats, I must heap praise upon the story.
The narrative stays engaging throughout. The unique relationship between the player character Amicia and her younger brother Hugo often becomes more interesting than the larger governing plot about the 14th century French plague and the Inquisition.
Hugo is experiencing the world for the first time–after a lifetime of quarantine due to a mysterious sickness–so the travesties around him come across as fairly mundane considering he has no outdoor normalcy to contrast it against. He reacts with relative disinterest to most things, saving his biggest reactions for more traditionally mundane things. For example, he learns of his parents’ very recent death and shortly after walks into an empty cathedral to hear an echo for the first time. He’s equally impressed by the echo. His awe is humbling and so incredibly powerful when juxtaposed against the horrors around him. This tension between childhood innocence and inevitable death is balanced by you–a player character who is herself only a teenager–trying to be the hero and the protector as an interim mother figure. You’ve got a lot of weight on your shoulders as the player.
The music is incredible, too. Set pieces are accentuated by haunting cello strings spiked with piercing violin. These same sounds come in less aggressively but no less affect as player cues when danger lurks nearby.
Even the menu select screen is inspired. The close observer will notice that the firelight scares the rats away, which is an important mechanic in the game. A menu screen that can teach the player is a pretty cool menu screen.
A Plague Tale: Innocence could be my game of the year. Though I’ve only played 3 other 2019 release, and I have yet to play Wolfenstein: Youngblood, The Outer Worlds, Doom Eternal, and Death Stranding). But, I wouldn’t be surprised if this game survives that late 2019 gauntlet.
Learn more about A Plague Tale: Innocence
Credits:
- Pump Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
