A Plague Tale: Innocence PS5 Review

A Tale of Family

I have wanted to play this stealth game from Asobo games and Focus Entertainment for quite a while and since the sequel is coming to PS Plus soon i thought this is as good a time as any to dive into this game centered around a young 15 year old girl called Amicia and her young 5 year old brother Hugo during a plague and the inquisition in what i believe is the 13th-14th century France.

Premise

Early on in A Plague Tale, you get thrown into a scenario where you must protect your younger brother and have to stay away from enemy inquisition soldiers who are out to get you by any means. You get to move around a linear world in France around your home and nearby villages and towns as you have to use stealth and cunning to bypass the multitude of obstacles and puzzles you must conquer to move on to the next. While the game is a stealth game at its core there is still scenarios of combat that you can engage in with a sling Amicia carries which can be upgraded throughout the game at weapon upgrade stations/desks.

Combat

The combat system in A Plague tale innocence is pretty basic with just one weapon but there are multiple different types of ammo you get to upgrade in the duration of the campaign. These vary from fire igniting and extinguishing types to rat controlling types that serve a function later in the game when you can use them in the many rat scenarios in the game that play a big part in the story and can at times be the only way to bypass a section when you must use the rats wisely. I found the control system quite broken at times though and they felt not very responsive or just wouldn’t do what i wanted them to do and got frustrating at times. This happened a lot during fight sequences a lot and would cause me to die quite a lot. Now while i did die sometimes due to my own issue, i would get spotted by my other characters that were following me like Millie or the Black smith who would just run out in front of soldiers or when i asked them to attack they would go to then just get confused and do nothing or come push me out of stealth. Some forms of the combat where pretty cool like having to throw certain alchemy stones at armored soldiers that made them take their helmets off where you could then be able to headshot them with your sling. The lock on certain enemies seemed to just jump off them at odd times which meant i missed a lot of time precious shots but part from that, the combat system was pretty rounded.

Graphics & Sound

The setting in A Plague Tale Innocence is 13-14th century France so graphically it is very impressive even if the game is linear, meaning it is not open world and you can only follow a set path with just a handful of areas that set away from the main campaign path to find several hidden flowers or chest scattered about with resources. The characters are not bad but do look a little dated at times usually during the many cutscenes that happen throughout the campaign. Amicia and Hugo characters definitely got more care in the artist department and it shows. The biggest showcase in A Plague Tale is the rats in the game and how many are on the screen at any given time and play a very important role in the game. The rats are afraid of light and the in-game mechanic to use this weakness plays out throughout the game also and at times is the Centre of a puzzle solving mission. The lighting in the game also played a role and was pretty decent in the areas that it did.

The audio in A Plague Tale Innocence was pretty decent with cutscene audio dialogue sounding good and the audio of soldiers from a distance was just at the right volume when playing out with NPCs and cutscenes. The only real audio issue i noticed was with Hugo where he would be giving you valuable advice during certain boss fights or particular elevated scenarios and the volume of his speech was very low so i would miss his helpful comments because the scene audio was higher than him and drowned him out.

Summary

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a great game and for the most part played out with little hitches and was a joy to play through the campaign which was about 10 hours long, depending on how curious you are, i for one always look everywhere so was more like 15 hours for me. The controls did frustrate me more than once but it did not take too much away from the title and i am looking forward to playing the sequel soon.