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.
A Plague Tale: Innocence reviewDeveloper: AsoboPublisher: Focus Home InteractivePlatform played: PS4Availability: Out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One
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.
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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.