HomeFeaturesA Plague Tale: Requiem
A Plague Tale: Requiem has dialled up the rat horror, but shows restraint in its approach to violenceA textbook bit of sequelcraft
A textbook bit of sequelcraft
When we last saw Amicia andHugode Rune at the end ofA Plague Tale: Innocenceback in 2019, things were looking up for the orphaned rat wranglers. They’d escaped the clutches of the French Inquisition and the hordes of plague rats following in their wake, and the pair were hopeful about finding a cure for the cursed macula flowing through Hugo’s veins.
As you might expect from a sequel, Amicia has a lot more tools at her disposal than she did fighting the Inquisition back in her Innocence days. In addition to the two new weapons she’s packing alongside her trusty slingshot, she’s picked up a deeper knowledge of what she can do with them, such as stabbing enemies in the back if she can get close enough, and countering grabs and lunges with space-creating punches. She’d probably make a fine apprentice to someone like Eivor or Corvo with the right kind of training, but thankfully there’s still a lingering roughness to the way she carries herself (to say nothing of poor little Hugo still stuck on her arm) that make these newfound takedowns feel like a last resort.
A Plague Tale: Requiem - Gameplay Overview TrailerWatch on YouTube
A Plague Tale: Requiem - Gameplay Overview Trailer
The option to distract unsuspecting enemies with rocks and pots remains, of course, but Amicia’s at least learned how to make better use of the latter. Rather than simply using them as a distraction tool in Requiem, she can now stuff them with the same alchemical recipes previously confined to her slingshot, creating wider and more potent areas of effect for her illuminating Ignifers and rat-drawing Odoris crystals. Most of these alchemy tricks will be familiar to Innocence players, but it’s heartening to see so many of them unlocked already, as the Odoris crystals in particular were a real late-game addition in Requiem’s predecessor. There’s even a brand-new one on show here - Tar - which sizzles and burns when it makes contact with an open flame, and can be used to devastating effect on heavily armoured, torch-bearing soldiers, as we soon get to see for ourselves in one of Requiem’s close-quarters boss battles.
If Amicia has a spare knife to hand, she can one-hit kill enemies for a silent takedown - assuming no one else catches her in the act, that is.
After stumbling our way through an abandoned quarry - thesame one shown off during Microsoft and Bethesda’s E3 showcasea couple of months ago - a hulking great giant blocks our path. Stones and crossbow bolts are useless against his thick sheets of armour, but that fiery ball and chain he’s carrying? Now that we can work with. I fire some tar at the flames with Amicia’s slingshot, and the explosion stuns him for a few precious moments, long enough to get behind him and shoot off the latch holding his armour together. Again, it’s a similar trick to how we tackled our very first battle at the start of Innocence, but here the tight, claustrophobic nature of the arena and the sheer breadth of this screen-hogging metal man cast these familiar motions in a new, more dangerous light. With his armour peeled away, all that’s left is to drive a tar-coated crossbow bolt straight into his chest, which also catches fire in such a brutal and agonising way that it makes me wince. Maybe that was a tad unnecessary, the tar bolt. Perhaps a regular one would have been better.
Pots can now be filled with Amicia’s alchemical recipes, helping to create more pathways through the rats hiding in the darkness.
Another lets Hugo go full rat, allowing him to control the horde directly through a first-person perspective to swallow up any guard stupid enough to come out without a lantern. It’s gruesome, but wonderfully so - though this long-awaited power fantasy also comes at a cost. The first few times Hugo needs to take control the rats to defend an increasingly woozy Amicia, you can do so freely, taking as long as you want to swirl and undulate through the environment in your shrieking wave of death. But just as Amicia cries out for Hugo not to get lost in his own nightmare, the tiny chap gets overwhelmed and ends up unleashing a veritable tidal wave of rats that threatens to gobble up not onyl him, but the injured sister he’s trying to protect as well.
Riding a wave of rats in first person has a real visceral momentum to it.Seeing said wave consume a human in three seconds flat is… something else.
Riding a wave of rats in first person has a real visceral momentum to it.
Seeing said wave consume a human in three seconds flat is… something else.
Accompanying them on this weather-beaten beach is newcomer Arnaud, a lone knight on the run who clearly has some previous beef with Amicia (and may or may not have given her that nasty head wound that caused her so much trouble). Tempers are constantly on edge when he’s around, but over time even Amicia sees that he’s quite the capable Hugo-handler when her efforts to rein her overexcited brother in prove wanting. They settle into an uneasy alliance over the course of this second (or rather seventh) chapter, and after a particularly nasty run-in with a swarm of rats in an infested sea cove, Arnaud agrees to battle alongside them and share the burden of combat. Essentially, he’s a bigger, badder version of Rodric from the first Plague Tale, capable of fighting soldiers on his own with his sword and shield, as well as acting as a handy crank-turner for puzzles when Amicia’s needed elsewhere for a bit of platforming.
Arnaud is a prickly presence in Requiem’s seventh chapter, but he does know a handy pirate whose boat can get them to the island Hugo saw in a dream to help them find a cure for his rat powers.
Yet again, it all feels very Innocence-like. But Arnaud quickly shows he’s so much more than just another Rodric-shaped hole to be directed as Amicia pleases. He’s an adult for starters, and a highly effective killing machine, providing a well-observed foil for Amicia in the eyes of her brother. A knight is romantic and brave and daring, after all, but will Hugo ever be able to square Arnaud’s actions with those of his sister? There seemed to be hints of a few cogs turning behind his wide, saucer-like eyes during my demo, but whether Requiem will push this point further remains to be seen. I hope it does, as everything else I saw in my demo points toward a team who have taken great care over how these characters have matured over the course of their journey. It would be a shame if Asobo didn’t interrogate these themes more deeply in Requiem’s later chapters, and an absolute travesty if these strong foundations end up as nothing more than a prelude to a knock-off Assassin’s Creed. I mean, the first game ended up with you fighting a rat pope, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility, is all I’m saying.
