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A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019)

Started by Bazooka, May 01, 2021, 11:37:46 PM

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Bazooka

Finally got around to finishing this game, developed by French studio Asobo studios who also developed Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 and generally some jank tier stuff, but this was really great, and nice to play a new IP with a fresh setting.

It's a couple of years old now and I'm sure many of heard of it if not played it, the general concept is you play as a girl and her five year old brother in 13th century France, there is a plague where the rats don't just infest but consume all living things.  You guide the siblings through primarily stealth sections to avoid the inquisition who want the family because they have special blood that plays a part in the whole plague narrative.

Most puzzles make use of fire and light sources, the rats will consume you unless you remain in lit areas. Your only weapon is a sling, and as you progress you gain new ammo, standard rock can knock lanterns and torches from guards hands or KO them if they have no helmet, other ammo ignites or extinguishes fire sources and so on.

The game looks great, and the characters feel fully realised, and I cared about the young assemble of youths you meet who aid you on your quest. The mechanics elevated it from just being another stealth game, but there were plenty of cheap deaths, mainly around the hit boxes of the rat swarms and the game assuming you know where some guards will appear.

I highly recommend playing this is you see it on sale or on game pass, as it's not often well made little gems with a new concept and strong story come about.



Zetetic

Just to confirm - it's currently included in Xbox Game Pass for PC.


wooders1978

Its a bloody brilliant generally but the final boss battle is one of the worst things in gaming

Bazooka

Yes it took me a few goes because I accidentally stood on a rat's cock and got insta killed.

Zetetic

I've given this a go, and there's so much I want to like about it... but it's constantly at war with itself, nearly ruined in every other moment by the attitude that it needs to be recognisable as a computer game with multiple mechanical systems.

I think the light/rat mechanic would be good if they'd fucked off everything else and focused on ensuring that it didn't undercut the environments that so much effort had been put into.

Zetetic

The crafting system, resource gathering and limited ammunition are this interlocking mess of pointlessness that does nothing but make the game much worse than it should be.

You only need the crafting system and resource gathering because the limited ammunition is sort of vaguely irritating - although never actually challenging or interesting , because the game has too many places where running out of ammunition would be a hard fail, so it ensures you always have enough - and one of the ways it's irritating is because it's bound up with juggling resources and carrying capacity.

In the university, and the environment is beautiful (although, again, the player is surrounded by extremely flammable material which they have to pretend doesn't exist for the purposes of half of the mechanics), but I'm having to constantly stop myself from hunting for bits of paper and make myself look at them.

Zetetic

Think the sound stuff in it is really good, including Amicia's English-language voice artist. Think the costume design, particularly Amicia's and how the same item of clothing changes over time, is as well.

Zetetic

Muttering to myself over and over again that they better not make me play Hugo, before of course they do.

Wonder if he comes across better in French VA, but I doubt it. A mistake regardless, I think - would be better to keep the player as Amicia, seeing Hugo's development and strangeness through her eyes.

Zetetic

Having finished it, I enjoyed playing it well enough, and spending time in some of its places and with Amicia as a character a bit more than that.

I'm not sure what it wanted to be about though. "Innocence"? Yeah, you see Amicia (and Hugo) become a killer and get a bit upset about that, briefly, and them both be basically ... fine at the end of it all. The game puts a bit of effort into trying to convince you that Amicia is a dick for not telling Hugo that their mother is being tortured to death... and I don't know why.

One theme that never really develops is the ambiguous nature of decay and destruction.  The levels where you're picking your way around the remains of battlefield, at the start of the Hundreds Year War, in the shadow of a Roman aqueduct (which is far bigger than any other structure in the game) seemed like it was opening up something about cycles of change, which I tried to read into the way that the rats seemed to be building something new out of the death of the old, and the way the plot kept looping back towards what the Romans left behind and so on, maybe the idea of alchemy itself.

I don't think I've invented this - at the very end of the game, you can even go overhear a couple of people discussing about how the rat plague wasn't all bad, how the collapse in labour supply means that those who are left can demand better wages, how it was a "necessary evil". But, again, it doesn't really go anywhere.
(Incidentally, it's possible that the Black Death also ended up concentrating fixed capital in fewer hands, so a mixed-bag inequality-wise.)


Zetetic

Quote from: wooders1978 on May 03, 2021, 05:50:39 PMIts a bloody brilliant generally but the final boss battle is one of the worst things in gaming
I think it could've done with "you've fucked this up several times, here's a bit more visual feedback showing you how easy it actually is". It's trivial once you understand what it's asking of you, and has a terrible difficulty spike in the last stage if you don't quite get it. (Which wouldn't be so bad if the penalty wasn't replaying the two stages that are easy to get through with only a vague idea.)

Zetetic

What it makes me really want is to spend more time as Amicia, in that world, doing something a bit more pleasant and talkative.

Zetetic

Quote from: Zetetic on May 11, 2022, 10:03:18 PMThink the sound stuff in it is really good, including Amicia's English-language voice artist.
They've stopped her doing a (cod?) French accent in Requiem, and after 40 seconds I'm enjoying it much less.

Zetetic

Switched to French VA, but a forced Hugo crawling section (with a phoenix who should obviously just be Jesus or something) followed by a forced oh-no-I've-lost-my-sling section in the first 15 minutes or means that I can't be doing Requiem for the foreseeable future.

Lost Oliver

Currently enjoying this as it comes free with January's PS Plus.

C_Larence

That's the sequel "Requiem". I've been playing it too and not particularly enjoying it. It's often beautiful and certainly an impressive achievement for a small studio. I absolutely hate the voice acting, there's a lot of whispering throughout the game which makes me feel physically nauseous and I can't work out why. Amicia also don't shut up for a second, constantly saying what she sees or what she wants. I ended up turning the dialogue volume off for a while but the subtitles don't make it clear who's speaking so it was too confusing.

It's a shame as I remember being impressed with the first game, perhaps I've just become old and bitter in the intervening 4 years.

Zetetic

Amica's voice acting is less enjoyable in the sequel and that made a big difference for me.

The sequel also doubles down on some completely avoidable awfulness near the start, favouring dreadful gaminess over being enjoyable or interesting.