Posted in: A Plague Tale: Innocence, Focus Home Interactive, Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: A Plague Tale: Innocence, Asobo Studio, Focus Home Interactive, game review

[Review] A Plague Tale: Innocence is Hauntingly Hopeful and Heartbreaking

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Asobo Studio and Focus Home Interactive's A Plague Tale: Innocence is as beautiful and heartbreaking as the story of two young children surviving the Spanish Inquisition and Black Plague ever could be. The game's scenery is engrossing, the story is handled with a deft touch, and the stealth action is intuitive but unforgiving. A Plague Tale is a hauntingly hopeful game with stakes as brutal as the base difficulty level. Which makes it a near-perfect experience.

The environments of A Plague Tale: Innocence are absolutely stunning, as you should expect from a game set in France. Even the plague-riddled streets of hard-hit towns have a raw kind of beauty to them. There's a ton of detail in each pile of rubble, in the intricate designs of churches, and every pile of book in the de Rune family home. Unfortunately, the character models are a bit less well-crafted, with their animations feeling rough and their designs looking a few years out of date. It's as if all the attention given to the environments and plague rats was skipped over on the character models. However, the gorgeous environments are at least rich enough to keep you distracted. Until you come across a nest of plague rats, and then you'll wish the game was a bit less well-detailed.

The game's story is a heart wrenching tale of two children on the run from the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, while also needing to dodge the vicious plague rats at the same time. While the subject matter is heavy, and only gets worse as the story goes along, the narrative handles both tragedies with the same amount of care. The player controls Amicia, the older sibling, as she tries to guide and protect her younger brother Hugo. While the game essentially plays as one long escort mission, you just can't help but feel for Hugo, even at his most annoying.

As for the gameplay, A Plague Tale: Innocence is a stealth action game, with a bit of combat thrown in as well. Most of the time, you'll be playing in a non-violent manner, trying to sneak past and around the Inquisition soldiers and angry, superstitious towns-people. However, much of that stealth action is done with very little margin for error. Running through a small, plague-riddled hamlet early on in the game, you've got split-seconds to make decisions on how to out-run the mobs chasing you.

And while the game does try to herd you through the streets of the town, one wrong move will get Amicia or Hugo killed. Which is an automatic loss. In fact, even the "tutorial" of the game is unforgiving. So going into actual combat, where all you have to use is Amicia's sling against an armored giant of a man, well. That makes for some incredibly tense gameplay. And it's an absolute joy.

Honestly, the only thing about A Plague Tale: Innocence that is sub-par are the character models. And even those aren't egregiously bad. They're just not as good as the rest of the game. Which is a pretty forgivable sin. A Plague Tale just might be my favorite game so far this year, though it's still hard to say. That said, it absolutely blew my expectations out of the water. I absolutely recommend you pick this one up as soon as you can.

And I'm far from the only one. In the short weeks since it's release, the game has garnered an absolute ton of critical praise, which is well deserved.

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