A Plague Tale: Requiem Review: The Rats Are Back In Town
It’s funny how small changes can make a huge impact. I enjoyed A Plague Tale: Innocence when it was released in 2019, but it had a lot of nagging issues that I had a hard time overlooking. While it featured a gripping story, actually playing that game was often an issue thanks to controls that were slow to react to changing situations and linear design that expected players to solve things in a very specific way. While I’m glad I played it to see Hugo and Amicia’s story, I spent the final hours mostly just wanting it to be over.
I feel a lot differently about A Plague Tale: Requiem , which in some ways is strange because, at its core, this is not a very different game. You still play as Amicia De Rune, combat is still built around your sling, and stealth is still usually your best option. You’re still dragging your annoying little brother Hugo around by the hand for large stretches of the game. Yet by improving a lot of minor issues just a bit, the overall experience has been transformed. Parts of the game that, once frustrated, get out of the way and allow the game’s strengths to shine. It helps make A Plague Tale: Requiem one of this fall’s best titles.
Peace Never Lasts
Six months have passed since the ending of A Plague Tale: Innocence, where Amicia saved her brother and put her family back together, at least a little bit. Ever since then, they’ve been traveling the country in relative peace. Hugo’s connection to the Macula, a disease which causes him to control, and lose control, of untold swarms of rats, has been held at bay. Peace never lasts long, though, after all, there’s a reason we have another game. When Hugo is triggered to reconnect with the swarms, the horror starts again. Now his family is torn on what to do. Should they trust in an ancient order of alchemists who say they can help but whose actions don’t suggest they’re ready for this? Or should they search for a mysterious island Hugo keeps dreaming about, which may hold a cure?
Players will feel immediately at home in Requiem if they played Innocence. This is still a stealth action game where you’ll spend a lot of time hiding in tall grass and slipping through cracks in the environment. Your main weapon is still your sling which you use to launch rocks at enemies and the environment to progress, often combining them with a bit of alchemy to give you additional options like lighting fires or putting them out. If shown footage of the two games side by side, you might not initially know which was which, though if looking for more than a moment, the incredible graphics of this sequel, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen on console, would give it away.
A Thousand Small Improvements
A longer look, though, or frankly just playing the game, will make it clear pretty quickly, though, because A Plague Tale: Requiem is improved in a thousand small ways which may not stand out immediately, but which over time make it the obviously superior title. It starts with choice. Innocence was an incredibly linear game, not just in its progression, but also in how you were expected to tackle each area. There was one set way you were meant to get past each challenge. It wasn’t even just having to use stealth; it was use stealth in this exact way. That became a drag as I got deeper into the game and longed for a bit of control.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is a far more open game. Not in how you explore the story, this is not an open-world title, and you’ll be tackling your tasks in a set order, but in how you explore each environment. Areas tend to be far more open this time, with paths featuring multiple ways through which you’re free to explore. There will be a street you can walk down, with stairways and ladders and buildings you can hide in and sneak through. It doesn’t feel like there’s one specific way the game expects you to take, you’re free to use all of your tools in the way that makes the most sense to you in the moment. Sometimes things will go wrong, such as sneaking past an enemy only to find a horde of rats you can’t see an immediate way past in your way, leaving you scrambling to get back into cover, or preparing for combat. These moments no longer feel like something has gone wrong, they just feel like they’ve evolved, and your plan has to evolve as well. It’s a welcome change because, in the first game, that would have usually felt like a game over.
New Choices
Speaking of combat, that’s another major evolution in Requiem. In the first game, combat was something you wanted to avoid at all costs. Amicia had her sling, and you could use it to take out unsuspecting enemies who didn’t happen to have a helmet, but you almost always felt out of your depth. Which is normal when you have a fourteen-year-old girl taking on trained soldiers, but it wasn’t a lot of fun, and slow controls didn’t allow you to react quickly in far too many situations. That’s no longer the case. Everything feels much snappier, and new weapons and attack options, such as a crossbow which allows you to take out even many stronger enemies quickly, albeit, with limited ammo that you’ll want to conserve, make the combat not just more enjoyable, it makes it often feel like a legitimate option. No, you don’t have the resources to just go through the game slaughtering everyone before you, this is still mostly a stealth game, but there are times to flee and times to fight and mixing the two together presents excellent options.
Which of those options you choose to utilize will shape your abilities as well. A new progression system has you gaining new abilities not based on your own choices, but based on how you play. Choose combat frequently, and you’ll get new options to help you in combat, such as the ability to shove your foes directly into flames or rats if you come up behind them. Sneak around more, and you’ll gain abilities that make you harder to detect. I frequently watched these abilities and even crafted how I played based on the abilities I wanted, which was very cool.
A Personal Journey
Combat becoming more reasonable of an option mirrors Amicia’s growth throughout these games as well. In Innocence, she was a religious young girl thrust into a world of horrors. Killing took an enormous toll on her, and she did it only with deep regret. We see her evolving in Requiem, though. She’s grown used to killing to protect herself and those she loves. At times she even seems to enjoy it, she’s certainly good at it. She’s still a child, however, dealing with unspeakable terror. She starts to break down mentally, and it’s hard to blame her, it’s a miracle that she can keep moving forward with what she has to deal with. Amicia is one of my favorite new protagonists in recent years, and her journey here is frequently heartbreaking.
Those horrors come in many shapes and sizes. Often it’s thanks to the cruelty of men, with people turning against each other when things get hard and doing some horrific things. Mostly though, it’s the rats. They’re back in far greater numbers. The original game reportedly topped out at around 5,000 rats on screen at once. This time that’s up to around 300,000. The difference is palpable, with them flooding far larger areas. Some set pieces have them tearing the world down around you in a way which is deeply terrifying. One, in particular, will stay with me for a very long time. Even light isn’t quite as sure-fire a protection as it once was, and you’ll have to stay on your feet to survive them.
New Friends, New Dangers
Amicia doesn’t have to handle all of this on her own, at least. Several new characters keep things fresh, both from a story perspective and by being useful. Arnaud, a soldier with a secretive past, can be commanded to directly challenge enemies in combat. He’s good enough to handle most anyone one on one but can get overwhelmed at times if you don’t help keep enemies off him. Sophia, meanwhile, is a smuggler who owes Arnaud a favor. She can use a piece of metal to set fires in tall grass as a distraction, and even to help reflect light to progress through the rat hordes. It isn’t only new characters who travel with you and help, either. Hugo gains the ability to control the rats for a time, turning your long-time foes into something that can help you in the right situation. These new abilities and options help keep things fresh.
While so many of my issues with Innocence have been resolved this time around, Requiem does have a few of its own. There are a few slow chapters which kind of drag on without much in the way of gameplay, merely pushing the plot forward. The story is always interesting, but I prefer when it’s spread out a bit more, and a focus is kept on playing. Some of the later chapters lean too heavily on combat as well, with several sequences filled with heavily armored enemies that you simply must stand and fight against. Doing this with your normal resources would be nearly impossible, too, so Requiem starts having environmental resources reload, something that never happens throughout the rest of the game. When you have to change the entire foundation of your game fifteen hours in to make a sequence work, it’s worth questioning whether that sequence is the right choice. Combat is much improved from the first game, but it hasn’t become Requiem’s strength, it’s just no longer a weakness. I think a more compact version of these fights could have worked, but as is, they drag on for far too long.
Conclusion
No game is perfect, but A Plague Tale: Requiem is everything I could have asked for in a sequel. It refines and improves on all of the issues I had with Innocence, creating a game that doesn’t feel all that different, but simply feels far better. Instead of reinventing the wheel, the team at Asobo Studio evolved it instead, making a far better version of an already good game with a refined version of the same formula. Anyone who remotely enjoyed the original needs to check it out.
Final Verdict: 4.5/5
Available on: Xbox Series X (Reviewed), Xbox Series S, PS5, PC, Switch (Cloud Version); Publisher: Focus Entertainment; Developer: Asobo Studio; Players: 1; Released: October 18th, 2022; ESRB: M for Mature; MSRP: $59.99
Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of A Plague Tale: Requiem provided by the publisher.
