A Plague Tale: Innocence

This review contains as many spoilers as the game contains rats.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a stealth-adventure game that greatly succeeds in setting up an intriguing story and building a gripping, oppressive atmosphere, excelling in mood and tension during its first hours. Unfortunately, the latter half is bogged down by an increasing sense of power and an underwhelming ending.

Our young protagonist, Amicia de Rune, is the daughter of a French lord in the 14th century, living with her family in a wealthy state. She’s introduced as a hunter, going out with her father and her dog, Lion, to look for game. Eventually, they come across a bizarre sight: in a destroyed patch of the forest, there’s a dark hole that seems to hide some vicious monster, which immediately drags Lion down with it. It’s a great start, as it presents the protagonist as someone who can fend for herself, who knows how to hide, how to track, and how to kill, and sets up the supernatural danger that awaits her.

Despite this promise of the supernatural, however, there’s a clear attempt to build a grounded, detailed medieval world. Building interiors are brimming with detail, inviting us to pause for a moment and study them. The main collectibles, for example, are objects that Amicia finds scattered around the environment: their only purpose is the historical information they provide, as their descriptive text allows us to know a bit more about that era.

If we go off the main path to explore, we can often find situations where Amicia has unique interactions with the environment, which reveal a bit more about herself or her relationship with her family. When she arrives at her father’s state after the hunt, for example, she will pray for her dog’s soul if we come near an altar, showing that she’s a woman of faith who really cared about her animal companion.

Bathed in sunlight, filled with colorful flowers, and surrounded by a lush forest, her home is presented as an idyllic place – a great contrast to the horrors that will follow. Even the servants give her a warm welcome, but soon start talking about people being bitten in town during the night. One even talks of vampires, while another ponders, “We must have sinned to be punished so.”

Soon, then, the peace of Amicia’s home is broken when soldiers from the Inquisition storm the estate, killing everyone on sight. Amicia must escape with her little brother, Hugo, whom she barely knows – he suffers from a mysterious disease, which made their mother keep him away, isolated, while looking for a cure. The Inquisition is after the boy, which creates a tantalizing mystery: what’s special about his disease to warrant their attention and violence?

Their journey is one of hardship, sacrifice, and death. They meet and lose friends on the way, getting to know other orphans who recognize in them the same hurt, the same loss. The story dabbles with the occult – characters speak of forbidden books and alchemy – while the villains – the soldiers of the Inquisition – are violent and merciless, butchering everyone in their path.

This means that Amicia must take care of her brother in more ways than one. Besides saving his life – from the soldiers and from the disease – she also tries to shield him from the violence that surrounds them, at first even trying to bear alone the burden of what happened back home. In other words, she wants to keep Hugo’s innocent side unspoiled. Amicia often asks him to look away or close his eyes during their travels, for example, as the places they visit are always painted with the colors of death. However, when she’s angry at him – usually because he’s acting like the child he, well, literally is – it’s precisely with this violence that she hands out punishment: her outbursts are meant to attack his innocence, making him see, just for a moment, the horrors that surround them – so that Hugo can understand the need to be more responsible and obey her commands.

While running away from the Inquisition, they quickly arrive at a town ravaged by the plague. As they run away from an angry mob – people are enraged by grief and Amicia makes for an easy scapegoat –, they pass by streets littered with deformed bodies and houses marked by a white cross, which signals death and contagion. Hugo is asked to look away again, but sometimes the violence is so great that there’s no safe place for someone to avert their gaze. In one chapter, for example, they must walk on top of a sea of dead bodies in the middle of a battlefield: they are children having to step on mutilated corpses to survive.

It doesn’t take long for A Plague Tale to turn into a proper horror game. When Amicia and Hugo come across an almost abandoned church, the true meaning of the game’s title is revealed as swarms of rats erupt from the ground and infest the dark hallways and courtyards of the place, killing whoever dares come near them. There can be hundreds of them in a single room, going ferociously toward anything that moves.

These rats, however, are afraid of light, which allows some small puzzles to arise as we look frantically for potential light sources in the rooms: fireplaces are useful, but only torches or wooden sticks allow the characters to move with the light. But the sticks also burn out after a short while, adding the pressure of time to our actions: we must somehow get Amicia to the next big light source as fast as we can, before the fire goes out. Sometimes, Hugo must also go alone to another room – when the opening is too small for Amicia – to unlock the path from the other side, and so she must find a way to get the light over to wherever he is without getting in danger herself.

Eventually, Amicia gets the ability to create light sources from a distance, throwing some small explosives that ignite any fireplace or torch nearby. She’s equipped with an all-purpose sling, which can throw rocks and more exotic ammo: one of her newfound friends, for example, is an alchemist who can add strange properties to objects, which leads to her relationship with the rats changing with time, going from fear to something else entirely – they become tools to use against the Inquisition.

Amicia herself learns how to craft new things as well, from ammo to upgrades to her sling, as we find materials scattered around that can be used on a bench. The problem here with the progression system is that it eventually hands too much power over to Amicia. At the beginning, after all, the tension comes precisely from Amicia’s helplessness: a simple guard with a sword or a small group of rats in a hallway is sufficient to give us pause. After a while, however, she becomes able to eliminate both threats with her sling without breaking a sweat. By the end, Alicia can alone destroy a whole battalion of armored soldiers with just her sling, totally breaking the game’s oppressive atmosphere. This was no place for a power fantasy: tension, from this point on, can only be built in cutscenes or scripted events, when they remove our agency to allow the characters to be fragile once again.

Before becoming a very skillful killer, Amicia had to resort to stealth, which is also a bit silly in its execution. A Plague Tale employs a well-established mechanic in the genre: tall grass turns the main character invisible to enemies, who will appear bewildered that the girl they just spotted going for the nearby bush is now nowhere to be found. If she throws a rock or a pot in a certain direction, they will always go check the place, saying stuff like, “Nothing at all,” or, “Nothing, obviously,” when they find nothing there. It’s funny stuff, which means it works against the game’s overall sinister tone. In one particular scene, Amicia is inside an enemy camp, surrounded by soldiers who are actively looking for her, and then she drops a metal cage from a crane with a person inside… and no one nearby even notices the noise. The problem is not that this is all absurd – after all, this is a story with magical rats – but that it’s absurd in a comedic sense in a narrative that is otherwise tense and drab.

But even these silly moments of stealth are less damaging to the overall tone of the game than its final sections, since they at least make Alicia appear powerless before the dangers she must face. Later on, when apparently nothing can stop the girl – not even battalions of heavily armored soldiers or hundreds of monstrous rats – the story and the gameplay are completely at odds with each other: the former tries to be serious and tragic, trying to portray Amicia as a tortured, fragile soul, while the latter builds a power fantasy that turns the protagonist into a ridiculous killing machine. After Charles, the snob, played A Plague Tale, he printed fliers with the words “Ludonarrative Dissonance” and distributed them in a park near his home, to the bewilderment of everyone there.

Finally, we have the problematic ending. So, let’s venture together into this spoiler-filled territory. First, there’s a scene where a bishop pays a visit to the main villain, the leader of the Inquisition, Vitalis. The game has been connecting the Church to the monstrous rats from the very start: the villagers said the plague started in the town’s church, a white cross marks the houses hit by the plague, and the villain himself – who can control rats – is an inquisitor. But then this scene happens, when the game detaches Vitalis from the Church: the bishop reveals that the Inquisitor has been working by himself, against the Church’s wishes. The consequence is that the whole theme is immediately dissolved in liquid acid: suddenly, the villain doesn’t represent the greed and hypocrisy of the Church anymore. He’s just one bad apple: it’s not that the institution allows cruel people to acquire power; it’s not that it protects its own, rewarding corruption and even more vile acts; it’s just Vitalis himself, alone, that is the issue. This reduces and simplifies the scope of the problem that Amicia – and the people of France – must solve: they just need to get rid of one bad man, and everything will be alright.

So, after the final preposterous confrontation – which at least entertains in its sheer absurdity – the situation is immediately resolved: with Vitalis’ death, the plague is over – for reasons – and all is well. And, even though there’s an entire epilogue, the ending also fails to tackle matters that were important for the story. Amicia has just saved her mother, for example, a mother that has never been too present in her life and who hid from her very important supernatural things about the world, and yet they never get a chance to talk and sort things out: the mother is sleeping during the epilogue, which is just a bizarre narrative decision, as it allows the conflicts regarding the family relationship to remain unresolved;

A Plague Tale: Innocence, then, has great things going for it: its art direction is excellent; its set-pieces are memorable, and the oppressive atmosphere is very effective at first. Unfortunately, however, the tension dissolves as the game progresses, and everything culminates in a very disappointing ending.

November 01, 2022.