A Plague Tale: Innocence

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a stealth-adventure game that greatly succeeds in setting up an intriguing story and building an engrossing, oppressive atmosphere: it’s a game that excels in mood and tension. Unfortunately, it’s also one that is bogged down by an increasing amount of silliness and an underwhelming ending.

Our young protagonist, Amicia de Rune, is the daughter of a French lord and lives with her family in a wealthy state in the 14th century. She’s introduced to us as a hunter, going out with her father and her dog, Lion, to look for game. Eventually, they come across a bizarre sight: a destroyed area of the forest, where a dark hole seems to hide some vicious monster, who drags Lion down and kills him. It’s a great start, as it presents the protagonist as someone who can take care of 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, there’s a clear attempt to build a grounded, detailed medieval world. Building interiors are brimming with detail, inviting us to pause and study them. The main collectibles, for example, are objects that Amicia can find scattered around the environments: their only purpose is the historical information they provide, as the text that we can read after acquiring them allows us to know a bit more about that period.

If we go out of the main path to explore, we can often find situations where Amicia interacts with an element of the environment, revealing a bit more about herself or her relationship with her family. When she arrives at the 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 they 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, 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, who she barely knows – he suffers from a mysterious disease and so their mother has kept him away, 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 that recognize in them the same hurt, and 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. This means that Amicia must often ask Hugo to look away during their travels, 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 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 he can understand the need to be more responsible and obey her commands.

While running away from the soldiers, 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 signalizes death and contagion. Hugo is asked to look away, but sometimes the violence is so great that there’s no safe place for someone to avert their gaze. In one chapter, they must walk on top of a sea of dead bodies in the middle of a battlefield: they are children having to step on the corpses of soldiers to survive.

It doesn’t take long for A Plague Tale to properly turn into a 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, moving ferociously toward anything that moves.

These rats, however, are afraid of light, which allows some small puzzles to arise, forcing the player to look 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 get Amicia to the next big light source 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 where 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. The protagonist is equipped with an all-purpose sling, which can throw rocks and more exotic ammo: one of Amicia’s newfound friends 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.

Amicia herself learns how to craft new things as well, from ammo to upgrades to her sling. By exploring the environments, we can find crafting materials that can be used on a bench to make these upgrades. But the problem with the progression system in A Plague Tale is that it eventually hands too much power over to the protagonist. In the beginning, 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 her 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, breaking the game’s oppressive atmosphere. The tension, from this point on, can only persist in cutscenes or scripted events, when they remove agency from the player 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 spot 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 that are 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 is absurd in a comedic sense.

But even these silly moments of stealth are less damaging to the overall tone of the game than its later portions, since they at least make the characters appear powerless before the dangers they must face. Later on, when apparently nothing can stop Amicia – 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.

Finally, we have the problematic ending, but before venturing into specific, spoiler-filled territory, let’s point out the general issues: the ending undoes the development of one of its main themes, leaves some crucial narrative elements unresolved, and resolves others in a random, unearned way.

This paragraph contains spoilers. First, there’s a problematic scene near the ending, 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, in which the narrative detaches Vitalis from the Church: the bishop reveals that Vitalis has been working by himself, against the Church’s wishes. The consequence is that the whole theme is immediately dissolved: now, the villain does not represent the corruption, the hypocrisy, and greed of the Church. He’s just one bad apple: it’s not that his institution allows cruel people to acquire power; it’s not that his institution rewards corruption, which led to disaster in the Middle Ages; 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, and yet they never get a chance to talk: 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 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.