A Plague Tale: Innocence (Video Game Review)

Escort missions and stealth escapades are typically the death of games. While there are more modern exceptions to this, both areas have developed an understandable stigma thanks to poor design choices and mismanaged difficulties. So, to build a game with both as their core mechanics should have been a death sentence, and encouragement for others to avoid it like the plague. Instead, what we ended up with might be one of the best games of 2019, if not the best games of its type. And yes, I did write this introduction just to make the obvious pun.


The Synopsis

Ser during the events of The Hundred Years War, A Plague Tale: Innocence follows the story of Amicia De Rune and her younger brother Hugo. Driven from their home in France by the Inquisition and hunted across the battlegrounds of the ruined countryside, each of them must discover the secret past to their family. Yet soldiers, warrior priests, and sellswords are the least of their concern. An unending tide of rats and the black plague itself claims even more lives than any standing army, and their swarms hound the sibling's every step...
The Good

Narratively driven and character based, this was a game which was to live and die on how it executed its story. This isn't related to the story itself, which remains excellent, so much as how well it was integrated into the game and would work with the setting. A Plague Tale not only manages to display an excellent narrative throughout much of its gameplay with a quite terrifying villain, but it works in every way to show the game hooking you in through even basic timing. The challenges are linear, but they are so excellently timed in regards to mechanics and movements, that you always feel as if you are just inches away from disaster. Moments so small as trying to dodge about a distracted guard are dragged out due to Amicia needing to guide and help Hugo, making you feel as if you are about to be caught at any second. This could have so easily made it feel dragged out or even slow, but the addition of needing to help Hugo over obstacles helps to overcome this problem. In fact, it distracts you from it by making you feel as if his presence might lead to both of your deaths.

That last point might sound like a bizarre thing to praise, but it ties in almost perfectly to the major story arcs of each character. While most video game protagonists are written to react and observe events as the player guides them along, Amicia is written as someone out of her depth. While the older of the two siblings she is still a child, and that isn't ignored. The responsibility of keeping the two of them alive clearly weighs down on her, and she snaps at her brother in moments of tension, shows impatience and this is further strained by how the two are alienated. Equally, Hugo himself has outbursts of petulance and childish misunderstandings. This creates an excellent conflict which leads to considerable character growth, even when it is made clear that they need to rely upon one another for survival. There really is, one exception aside, no badly written figure among the ensemble cast; with many existing to subvert misconceptions of the era or even common medieval storytelling tropes.

The tight direction of the game helps to disguise its overall linearity and keeps up a constantly engaging pace. You will be lucky to pause and find yourself truly stuck on a puzzle or wander about trying to think around a problem despite their challenges. Equally, the lack of more open areas is something that the game disguises extremely well. This is executed by both the map designs but also the visual direction. This keeps you on track through drawing your attention away from the boundaries and even creating risks which has you unintentionally avoiding them. Oh, and the game is also gorgeous. While the graphics might not be up to SquareEnix standards, the attention to detail and lighting quality helps to elevate it far above the standard you would expect of a B-tier release. Well, that and the soundtrack, of course.

Yet none of this compares with the rats. Swarms of hungering rodents infest vast swathes of the countryside and these serve as an effective stand-in for zombies. A zombie you can isolate, pin down and defend against. A swarm of fast-moving flesh-consuming diseased rats? Their sheer presence and writhing tides are depicted in a way which will always have you on edge. It's less of an enemy than a force of nature, and one which can be used to your own benefit. While the horrors of war are a key factor within the game, and it leads to one of the title's most memorable moments. The fact that you need to cause several of them to continue, and how unrelenting the sense of horror is from their simple impact on the countryside, makes it easy to see why the marketing focused upon them so much. Well, that and one other bit which ties into the first problem below.


The Bad

Perhaps the single most problematic quality behind A Plague Tale stems from its overall twist within the plot. While the story manages to be relatively realistic with some welcome displays of values dissonance due to the time, it starts to go a bit pear-shaped towards the end. It's less A Game of Thrones and more Assassin's Creed in its later stages, with a dash of Condemned 2: Bloodshot in its finale. This is problematic as the plot itself is the essential focus here rather than the characters themselves, switching what had been a vehicle for a stronger piece into being the main focus. As a result, the desperate need to ramp things up for the climax ends up making the story go into a few overly silly areas. These are still effective in their own right, and in another game, this would be downright fantastic. However, here the jarring shift is akin to playing Witcher 3 only to have Final Fantasy X hijack the last few minutes.

A further problem stems from some rather odd issues in regards to certain key stealth segments. While much of the game is excellent in regards to how it handles dodging about the roving bands of guards, it isn't unwilling to make a few cheap shots. This comes largely into play at roughly the third-hour mark, where the tightly paced and otherwise well-directed stealth segments have a bit of a hiccup in regards to getting about a few enemies. There odd moments of spontaneous omniscience or seemingly the ability to see through objects which throws you off. This is almost certainly a bug, but it brings to mind some of the worst moments in the original Splinter Cell or even the Thief remake. It completely undermines the overall sense of reward from making careful moves and conserving resources. I only highlight this point as, when combined with the far more closed in environments, this can leave you feeling as if you are banging your head against a wall.

This is also to say nothing of how A Plague Tale is reliant upon its selling point of the rats. Ironically, at first, the rats themselves serve as an element within a far larger narrative. You can see how they link into many points within the story, and they are hardly in the background at any point. However, their impact upon society or even the sights left in the wake of their rampage carries almost as much horror as their actual presence. At a certain point, some of this is definitely lost, as it begins to focus more upon the rats as a direct enemy rather than a sheer force of nature. This causes the game to lose something, and sadly it ties into that weaker ending described above.


The Verdict

Even with its problems, A Plague Tale: Innocence is nevertheless a spectacular release. Were it not for the aforementioned problems in regards to its finale and odd glitches which turn guards into Judge Dredd with x-ray vision, this might well have attained a perfect score. Even with its linearity and B-tier budgetary standing, it remains head and shoulders above many more recent releases. If you're going to buy a single game in the next six months, this is definitely the one to pick out and keep.

Verdict: 9 out of 10