Children band together against the darkness of a
collapsing France in this bleak and beautiful if somewhat rickety
medieval fantasy.
Children struggling to right a world wrecked by
the old is a popular theme nowadays, within video games and beyond them.
Asobo's often-magnificent A Plague Tale: Innocence is one of the more
hopeful variations, pitching a small cast of photogenic youngsters
against religious zealots and man-eating rats in medieval France. Though
let down by an over-reliance on mandatory stealth, which drains a
little of the sorcery from some astounding locations, it is a
wonderfully dark and tender fairytale whose key draws are its frail but
indefatigable protagonists.
As
the curtain goes up, noble-born siblings Amicia and Hugo are chased
from their family estate by Inquisition soldiers, leaving their parents
for dead. The two are relative strangers to one another: the victim of a
hereditary sickness, which slowly blackens his veins over the game's 10
hour story, Hugo has spent his whole life locked away in a loft with
his mother, a master alchemist. This affliction is the reason for the
Inquisition's raid, and you'll spend much of the plot unravelling its
arcane origin. The older Amicia - the character you control for most of
the game - has grown up in her father's company and is a spirited
creature of the outdoors: when we first meet her, she's learning to hunt
with her sling. Their home's destruction throws them together for the
first time, much as the death of Faye does Atreus and Kratos in God of
War, and as in Santa Monica Studio's game, the story marches to the
gentle beat of their growing intimacy.
Hugo is often a source of frustration for Amicia, stuffing his hands
gleefully into baskets of putrid fruit in deserted villages, and wailing
in panic if she tries to explore without him. But his hard-wearing
childishness in the face of incessant horror is also her greatest
consolation, the thing anchoring her to herself as she does what is
necessary for them both to survive. One of the game's loveliest
explorations of this takes the unlikely form of a collectible, where
Hugo gathers flowers he recognises from their mother's books, inviting
his bedraggled and bloodied sister to stoop so that he can plait them
into her hair. The flower stays in Amicia's hair for the rest of the
chapter, even as you fell pursuing soldiers with your slingshot or
shatter their lanterns to expose them to the rats. It's a gesture that
says everything about who Amicia and Hugo are to one another, what
they've lost and what they've held onto - and tracking down those
blossoms quickly became as important to me as mastering the game's
slightly wayward mixture of stealth and terrain puzzles.
The
ruined lustre of its environments and the sheer adorableness of its
characters notwithstanding, A Plague Tale doesn't begin well. It
consists, at first, of all the palate-cleansing stealth bits you wish
they'd edit out of third-person shooters. The journey across France
takes you to a variety of beautifully imagined places - battlefields
checkered with trampled ensigns, moonlit cities on loan from Bloodborne -
but many of them boil down to pockets of short-sighted soldiers, all
trundling around their patrol paths, all talking loudly to each other or
themselves. Playing as Amicia, with Hugo holding your hand (you can
order him to let go where necessary with the D-pad), you lurk behind
upended wagons or in patches of vegetation, waiting for the point in the
pattern when every guard has their back to you. You can also lob rocks
at crates of armour and smash pots to lure guards away for the
genre-required 10 seconds or so of theatrical head-scratching.
Getting
caught is typically a recipe for death - Amicia can down unhelmeted
opponents with her sling, and break line of sight to reset guard
awareness, but unless you have a certain item in your inventory, she's
toast the second anybody saunters within swinging distance. It's all
rather uninspired next to the melancholy majesty of the setting and the
delicacy of the game's incidental dialogue (my tip: pick the French
language option - the French-accented English one is fine but a bit
Monty Python in places). Worse still are the "big action beats" that
conclude some levels - ungainly boss fights in which you circle-strafe
while aiming for weakpoints, hold-the-button chase sequences or
mercifully brief shooting galleries. The overall feel, for the first few
hours, is of a well-wrought and affecting story in thrall to extremely
worn-out genre conventions.
Fortunately, there's more to A Plague
Tale than sliding between viewcones and counting the beats till an
unsympathetic man with a spear looks away. There's the rat horde, first
of all, a ravenous tidal entity that explodes through soil and masonry
like pressurised oil. The rats will strip the flesh from anything they
come across, armour or no armour, but can be kept at bay with light.
Accordingly, while dodging Inquisition troops you'll need to attend
Thief-style to the play of illumination across each area. You'll use
quick-burning branches to force a path through them, the ocean of rodent
bodies closing back in behind you as the flame creeps down towards
Amicia's fist. Where torches are scarce you'll manipulate parts of the
environment, putting your shoulder to a brazier or hauling on a ballista
crank to send its burning projectile swinging out towards an object you
need.
You'll
also look for things the rats can scrunch on in place of Amicia and
Hugo, from animal carcasses and corpses strung up by your enemies to
your enemies themselves. All this changes the feel of the game, from
workmanlike sneakery to a gruesome, on-going question of just how
awfully you want to treat those hunting for you, with Hugo looking on. I
don't think the rat horde concept is quite explored to the full - in
the last third, there's a definite sense that the scenario designers
have run out of steam - but there are some opulent environment puzzles
to chew on, particularly once Amicia and Hugo team up with other
characters who have a certain degree of autonomy. The most decadent
takes the form of a giant clockwork castle made up of braziers on
tracks: to purge the place of scurrying threats, you must work alongside
a sour-mouthed thief, moving each brazier one by one to gain access to
another.
The other way A Plague Tale grows is in the familiar form
of equipment progression. In some respects this represents the game at
its most boring, most in hock to genre expectation: workshop benches
scattered around chapters let you plug craftable resources into a bevy
of iterative improvements, like being able to sling objects without
making a noise. More intriguing, though, are the alchemical recipes
bestowed on you by some of the people you'll befriend (who have
signature abilities of their own you can call on at intervals). These
include mixtures that douse torches or kindle embers, and foul-smelling
concoctions with which to choke out armoured adversaries, forcing them
to remove their helmets. These gadgets are hardly without precedent, and
none of the puzzles tethered to them are breathtaking, but they help
Plague Tale step away from its clunkier underpinning and make the most
of its gorgeous, horrendous locales. There's a marvelous, if slightly
rough-hewn additional set of abilities and puzzle considerations towards
the end of the game, which expose another side to the rodent plague - I
won't spoil them, but suffice to say it's worth the journey.
The
great shock of Plague Tale is that on some level, it's a Gears of War
game. The more obvious comparison is The Last of Us, another poignant,
apocalyptic escapade in which an older character guides a more innocent
soul whose blood is touched by destiny, but in practice, and for all the
absence of chainsaws, it's often Epic's game that comes to mind. It's
there in the tanky handling, with characters swivelling ponderously as
though secretly many times their own size. It's there in the sense of a
historical backdrop (the Sera of Gears is a pastiche of familiar
architectural traditions) being softly consumed by the supernatural: the
darkness alive with eyeshine, the twisted, bony black rot the rats
leave behind them, the alchemical motifs that gradually become the
plot's crucible. But above all, it's a question of framing. As in Gears,
you spend most chapters wending your way towards some distant landmark,
a brooding structure such as a windmill that is teed up for you with a
context-sensitive look command, then tugged into and out of view by the
intervening geography. It lends each stage of Amicia and Hugo's journey a
powerful inexorability, for all the trail-and-error process of
bamboozling soldiers - as though you were being drawn through its world
by gravity towards a procession of massive objects. It's worth giving
into the pull. Just don't forget to look for the flowers.
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