The bubonic plague that ravaged Asia and Europe in the mid 14th century was an iconic moment in the history of the Middle Ages. Humanity learned a grim lesson about sanitation and how diseases spread when the Black Death wiped out millions of people. Eurasian regions hit particularly hard saw an estimated 80% of their populations wiped out by the disease. The plague generally halved the population of wherever it spread.
The sickness was spread by inflected fleas. These small, near-invisible insects ushered in waves of superstition that led some people to believe the bubonic plague was caused simply by bad air.
But what if the plague was spread by a more visible source? What if it was the rats themselves that spread the disease? Rats that swarmed in rabid hordes that filled the streets of France in skittering, hissing, river-sized waves of rodents. Masses of them waiting in the shadows, waiting for just the right time to consume someone foolish enough to take a walk in the dark. One misstep and a person would fall right into a nightmare of flesh-rending teeth and fur.
A Plague Tale: Innocence provides players an unforgettable look into a world where that nightmare is a reality.
This is a spoiler-free review.
Innocence Lost
A Plague Tale: Innocence drops players into the life of Amicia de Rune, a French lord’s teenage daughter. The game begins with some nice father-daughter moments, but the arrival of the plague and the Spanish Inquisition quickly put an end to the pleasant times.
Fleeing for their lives, Amicia and her little brother, Hugo, are forced to enter a world they have been sheltered from. A world where the commoners are dying in the streets, caked in oozing sores. Where the ruthless Spanish Inquisition solders patrol the narrow streets, ready to kill on sight. Nowhere is truly safe, for even away from the gaze of the guards and the moans of the plagued, the rats lurk. Waiting.
Navigating the narrow sliver of survival that exists between the rats, the plague and the Inquisition is the player’s responsibility. A Plague Tale: Innocence asks players to fight, run, problem solve and scavenge in equal parts.
The necessity to do a little of each stretches A Plague Tale: Innocence’s identity, making it hard to define what it is beyond labeling it a pure adventure game.
There’s combat, but it’s limited to a slingshot and some alchemy-based abilities. There’s stealth segments, but they’re mostly just walking from one spot to another while Inquisition guards look the other way. There’s crafting and ability-building, allowing the player some agency, but it’s not too difficult to quickly max out the most-useful abilities. These revelations might disappoint players looking for a more action-oriented or stealth-oriented experience, but the action and stealth portions just supplement the main components of the game: the story and the handling of the rats.
Infested Puzzles
Sorry, Amicia, but the star of A Plague Tale: Innocence are the rats.
Thousands of rats can appear in seconds, flooding what was once a peaceful house or field into a sea of little monsters. They appear in waves, the sheer momentum of their movement is enough to allow them to burst from the earth in showers of dirt announcing their presence like a whale spouting.
Light is the only way to keep the rats away. During the day, sunny streets and forests are safe to walk through. At night, only areas lit by lanterns and torches are safe. One wrong step and the advantageous rats pour forth and will shred Amicia to the bone.
With this omnipresent danger, players must use what little resources they have to make their way through the infested environments. A Plague Tale: Innocence makes creativity a necessity for solving the game’s puzzles.
Because light repels the rats, Amica can venture through an infested area unscathed by utilizing torches or fast-burning sticks lit from bonfires. The majority of the game’s puzzles center on getting through an area by using light to deter the rats.
Sometimes Amicia must use special alchemy-based abilities to ignite torches she cannot reach by hand. Other times she must make due with a single source of light, planning each movement carefully so that her sole source of light doesn’t burn out before she can ignite another stick.
The puzzles were all relatively simple to figure out. Rarely did it take me a second or third try to figure out how I was supposed to move through an area. The lack of frustration better allowed me to focus on the story and appreciate just how chillingly impressive seeing so many rats at once was.
The Mind of a Rat
The artificial intelligence engine that powers the rats is spectacular to behold. As a light source moves, so do the rats. Repelled as if by magnets, the swarms of rats part around a light-sheltered Amicia, filling in behind her as she wades through the thickest of swarms.
The rats scamper over one another, leap over small obstacles and dart through holes in walls or into darker parts of a cave with lightning efficiency. Speaking for the PC version (with which the game was reviewed), A Plague Tale: Innocence renders the rats perfectly and the game was more than capable of filling my screen with so many rats that at some points that I stopped and stared in awe.
Seeing so many rats move so quickly to escape a moving light was satisfying in a way I did not expect it to be. Sometimes I’d simply play around with the lights just to watch the rats pour into whatever shadowy corner was closest. Additionally, shooting a torch out of an enemy’s hand and watching the rats pour in from all around the soldier, up his legs and into his armor, was also satisfying…but for different reasons. Those soldiers got the fate they deserved, they were pure evil.
Other characters, however, were anything but evil.
Friends and Family
As enjoyable as it was watching the rats run around while solving puzzles, it was the story that kept me engrossed for the dozen-or-so hours it took me to complete the game. Each level had a clear purpose within the story, each area had its own story to tell me. No inch of the game felt like filler.
The characters that populated the game were all as equally engaging and wonderfully portrayed.
It’s very easy for children characters to become annoying due to poor writing and weak acting. Amicia, Hugo and the handful of other young characters throughout A Plague Tale: Innocence were lucky enough to be brought to life by talented writers, animators and actors. Every moment with the characters was a treat.
The little conversations that populated each level were always interesting to listen to. They were moments that built character, teasing unique personalities and what their lives were once like.
During the more intense parts of the game, some of the characters, particularly the younger ones, reacted in ways that made my stomach drop. It’s difficult to talk about those emotional moments without ruining them, so for the sake of avoiding spoilers I’ll just say I actually felt guilty about what I was doing at more than one point in the game. Their young naivety beautifully contrasted with the grim reality of the game.
I just wanted to let those kids know that I was taking care of them and that everything would be alright.
I hoped.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a brutal story, and it being presented through the eyes of children makes it far more shocking and horrifying. As the dangers escalated, so did my resolve to get Amicia and Hugo through it all. The game’s story is certainly not one you’ll want to give up on.
Weary Eyes
The only element of the game that I disliked was the game’s visual presentation. For some reason, the designers added in a screen effect that makes dust particles appear stuck on the screen. If you’ve ever had dirty glasses or sunglasses, the effect was exactly that. The effect was most prominent in dark settings with a single source of bright light…which was the majority of the areas in the game.
The game also has a strange, distortion effect around the edges of objects. I tinkered with the graphical settings but nothing alleviated the slight blurring I was seeing. The effect resembled looking at a 3D film without 3D glasses on. As much as I wanted to admire the game’s otherwise stunning vistas, the blur was a constant reminder that I was looking at video game graphics.
Also, a more minor annoyance was when guards were nearby, but off screen, the game lights up the edges of the screen to indicate the general direction of the guard’s location. Unfortunately, the indicator resembles backlight bleed on a screen. When there were multiple guards around me at the same time, the edge of my screen were leaking white light into a relatively dark setting. It was distracting and dampened the tension of the moment.
Final Thoughts
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a near-flawless game that I’m unlikely to forget. The characters, the rats, the environments, the soundtrack and the story all work together to create a stunning experience that rivals the best games ever made.
The game doesn’t go all-in as an action game or a stealth game, but it finds its footing as a hybrid. It sticks to its goals and never strays too far from the light. A Plague Tale: Innocence is, without a doubt, going to be one of the best games to release in 2019.
This game was reviewed using a retail copy provided by the publisher.
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[…] Little Nightmares isn’t a jump-scare game. There are a few moments where events happen suddenly, but they’re not in-your-face loud-noises-and-bright-lights situations. Generally, the horror unfolds slowly and ploddingly — similar to that of A Plague Tale. […]