Rats. Rats, We’re the Rats
Plague Tale Innocence is a stealth adventure game developed by Asobo Studio. I suppose it would also fall under the survival horror genre since It has spooky rats, limited resources and more stealth than combat. You follow Amicia De Rune and her younger brother Hugo on the run from the inquisition and the incredible swarm of rats that have plagued France.
The rats don’t like the light so throughout the game you will mostly be dealing with light puzzles. You can throw fire to light things, dampen fire and essentially move the rats around to either solve puzzles or to kill the inquisition.
The inquisition has too many soldiers for Amicia to take head on so most if the game requires you to either stealthy take them out or distract them and go around. When you have to fight is when things get tricky. This game doesn’t want you to fight these guys so they make combat difficult. Amicia has a slingshot she uses to throw rocks and alchemic mixtures. Her aim is rough, I was playing on the PS5 so maybe that had something to do with it but she needed to lock on to an enemy in order to hit them but if they slightly wiggled she would lose the lock on and miss her shot. This was extremely stressful later on in the game when combat was necessary. I have a bone to pick with the fact that combat was discouraged throughout the whole game until the end when it was required. I didn’t really get enough practice throwing stones to kill people when the time came so I had to play a certain section over and over and over again and it was incredibly frustrating. I upgraded Amicia sling to also be better at handling rats specifically so when the inquisition became much more of a threat I wasn’t ready.
Throughout the game you must collect crafting materials in order to not only upgrade your sling but also you use the same materials to craft throwable alchemic mixtures. So if you use all of your materials crafting your weapons to defend yourself you won’t be able to upgrade your sling which will hurt you in the long run. As the story progresses you will find new throwables that distract either the rats or the inquisition. One point you can even pit the two against each other. Using the rats to destroy anything in your way feels like it is a moral choice and it should have consequences, however it really doesn’t change the very linear story but I think that’s the point.
It seemed like they really wanted to show that Amicia cares about her little brother Hugo and will do anything to protect him, including kill. At the time I felt this was strange since the two barely know each other and are really only connected by blood. When they lived in a castle together Hugo was hanging out in his room with his mom and Amicia never really hung out with him until the dire events of this game. Maybe family bonds are stronger than I personally think and perhaps that was what they were trying to tell me.
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