The announced trailer for A Plague Tale: Innocence, shown at E3 2017, was seriously jeopardized by the horrors of the plague. The video was full of blood, despair and, of course, rats. However, hordes of plagued rodents were not the only feature of the release version; rats, of course, were a success, but besides them the game has something to respect. A touching story about a sister and brother trying to survive in a plague has become, along with the atmosphere, one of the most successful finds of the project.

Medieval apocalypse

The game takes place in France 1348–1349. And gaining momentum unnoticed. The first few minutes we are shown an excerpt from the everyday life of the main character, Amicia de Rune. Here she walks through the woods with her father, trains to throw stones from a sling, hunts a wild boar...

The change in tone occurs gradually. First, the lull before the storm, then loud noises from the ground, and now we ourselves do not have time to understand anything, as we rush headlong to sound the alarm. Meanwhile, even stranger things begin to happen at home: unexpectedly, unexpectedly, the Inquisition breaks in at the door and demands to give them to our ward's younger brother, Hugo. But parents hastily poke the little Amitsiya and tell them to run away from their native lands.

Since then, the girl’s life has changed dramatically.

The gameplay in A Plague Tale: Innocence for the most part comes down to stealth and exploring linear, but spacious and diverse locations. At first, the game presents the main characters exclusively as victims who are not able to deal with the threats that await them, so at first they quite often had to hide from the guards and somehow fend off entire avalanches of rats.

Of course, Amitsia cannot be called completely defenseless; she knows how to shoot from a sling. However, in the case of rodents, weapons are useless: they are only afraid of light and fire. The only weakness of a practically unkillable pack of evil creatures is played out well when the characters fall into a confined space or simply find themselves surrounded. Fear does not let go, even if a torch is held in hand: a black cloud wriggling, gleaming with yellow beads of eyes, inspires awe. You can’t help but cringe, looking at how they fumble in anticipation of easy prey...

A Plague Tale: Innocence Tasks

Naturally, in such a survival situation without crafting, nowhere: at some point, Amicia will begin to practice alchemy in order to create new shells for the sling and other useful things in the household. This does not affect the battle, but taking into account alchemy, the game changes the approach to stealth and scrapes involving rats. Tasks become more complicated, but more varied: if before, Amicia had to get out of the trap with what would turn up by the arm, then with the advent of chemical shells, decisions become an order of magnitude larger. And you still have to constantly ensure that the components are always in abundance, otherwise you will not get to part of the hiding places.

Testament blood is thicker than water

The first half of the game touches on the infinitely complex topic of personal relationships between sister and brother. Amicia meets Hugo at the same time as the player, because before the girl was not allowed to communicate with him because of his illness; this difficult moment gives rise to a lot of awkward situations in which neither he nor she just knows how to behave. They, like a cat and a dog, sometimes swear, then reconcile. Either the brother screams that he wants to see his mother, then the sister does not withstand the pressure and breaks down, but after that she certainly runs after a naughty child. Of course, in terms of screenwriting, this dynamics is unlikely to compare with what happened between Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, but it turned out fine anyway.

And here, after all, rats also climb from everywhere, and the French Inquisition is on the heels; what the latter want from the heroes, by the way, it will become clear far from immediately. But the presence of two global problems makes the children rally and begin to trust each other. This is manifested in a variety of conditions - for example, when the unfortunate are forcibly separated and one of them needs the help of the other to reunite. So, baby Hugo can climb through the cracks in the walls, but Amitsia with accurate shots from a sling knocks down various objects, such as stairs and drawers.

The first chapters

After the first chapters, the plot sharply increases in scale, but, unfortunately, does not become more exciting from this. Instead of a chamber, touching story of the premature growth of two small people in the second half of the game, the narrative tends to lean towards a typical fantasy about superpowers, interfering with the real France of the middle Ages with some kind of fabulous nonsense.

The only bright spot is the new characters. The creators did not begin to limit Amicia and Hugo in communication, so during the story they will meet other children who are ready to share any hardships with the main characters. This not only makes the tone of the adventure a little less depressing, but also dilutes the gameplay with an abundance of new ways of teamwork.

From the game about the medieval plague, one could expect so much, and (considering the publisher) absolutely nothing. In fact, A Plague Tale: Innocence landed somewhere in the middle. The plot is original, but with the passage, it diverges more and more at the seams, exposing one hole after another. The whole gameplay comes down to hide and seek from guards and puzzles tied in the light and shadow. And the graphics, albeit beautiful, are spoiled by the facial animation. All these little things are given out in the game by a project well below the AAA level.