A Plague Tale: Requiem review – A long-distance rat race

There are few games where a review-in-progress – at least those where the player has passed the 50% playtime mark – doesn’t provide an accurate sense of the full experience. Medieval-set action-adventure A Plague Tale: Requiem, from developer Asobo Studio and publisher Focus Entertainment, is one of those rare examples.

This isn’t to say that the game changes drastically. Its flaws don’t suddenly melt away. But, through a shift in setting in its second half, the introduction of some new worldly (and refreshingly grown up) allies for adolescent heroes Amicia and Hugo de Rune, and the solving of a long overdue mystery Tomb Raider-style, Requiem receives a welcome shot of energy that reinvigorates the game, and helps propel players to the finishing line. Waiting at that finishing line is the emotional payoff that has been slow-burn building up over Requiem’s official 15 to 20-hour playtime (my thorough playthrough took 27 hours). When the hit finally lands, it’s as much of a gut punch as you would expect. And if it doesn’t make you cry, you’re a tougher person than I am.

Of course, it’s a fundamental failing that “getting to the good stuff” is such a slog. I said as much in my initial assessment of the game, where, at 14 hours in, I had yet to reach the island that Hugo dreams about from the first chapter. It was inevitable that the five-year-old and his 15-year-old big sister, protector, and the game’s playable protagonist Amicia, would make their way to the apparent paradise in an attempt to find a cure for the Macula – a supernatural blood disease that is pushing Hugo closer to death, and the world to disaster.

If A Plague Tale: Requiem existed alone – if it wasn’t a follow-up to 2019’s A Plague Tale: Innocence – then perhaps its imperfections would be less noticeable. Played back to back, the games are a visually and emotionally striking experience, a powerful one-two that complement each other. At the same time, though, the comparison makes it clear that A Plague Tale: Requiem suffers from a classic case of sequel bloat.

It’s not all bad. There a new secondary upgrade system called Skills that reflects playstyle, i.e. the more you sneak around, the more specialist stealth abilities you gain without any conscious action on your part. Most obvious in Requiem, though, Amicia has more options to deal with enemies, such as the addition of a crossbow and knives alongside her handy sling. The former helps in quickly eliminating armoured enemies, while the latter can be used as a last resort to escape grasping opponents – as well as breaking into locked treasure troves. Being spotted and rushed is no longer the end of the fight for our quick-to-anger heroine. New allies, meanwhile, provide useful new abilities for Amicia to harness (by directing her friends to help) in solving puzzles, traversing dangerous rat-filled settings, and facing waves of soldiers and mercenaries.

Requiem also embraces the already impressive, ultra-detailed visuals of Innocence and elevates them to another jaw-dropping level for this second stroll through 14^th Century France. A Plague Tale: Requiem is hands down my most beautiful game of 2022.

Though not short on gloom and darkness (this is a pretty pessimistic series, after all), Requiem is set in spring/summer, around six months after Innocence, which took place over an increasingly miserable autumn and winter. The sequel also shifts the action geographically, to the coastal south of France. The combined result is a horror under bright sunny skies, and against more rugged unforested vistas, creating an aesthetic contrast with the original game. This clever contrast extends to the gameplay of the final act, although discussing that means spoilers.

It’s just that A Plague Tale: Requiem lacks the narrative tightness and more linear nature of its predecessor, which I would score a 8.5 or 9/10. More doesn’t necessarily mean more after all. Maybe it was motivated by the desire to give players a heftier single-player experience, but there are times in Requiem where you must sneak across vast, patrolled environments back to back, with maybe a third stage of the exact same style thrown in for good measure. You have more tools and pathways to navigate these open spaces, but progress across them is usually and frustratingly slow. In turn, they put the brakes on plot advancement, leading to painful repeats of cut scenes and conversations. As a result, the main characters become irritating at times, while their NPC companions, short on dialogue options, say the same thing over and over, at least during gameplay.

It’s easy to get annoyed, which is unfair, as A Plague Tale: Requiem doesn’t shy away from heavy topics that other games (looking at you, Tomb Raider!) gloss over. After the horrific events of the first game, Amicia can succumb to paralysing panic attacks that stem from her post-traumatic stress. In these moments she beats herself up over her sense of weakness and uselessness, as others must step up in her place. It feels authentic, and you rarely encounter such rawness in video games.

Arguably every character in A Plague Tale: Requiem is burdened with thick emotional scar tissue, and deals with it in a different way. This applies even to new character Sophia, a pragmatic and always forward-facing smuggler, who provides a much-welcome adult perspective for the De Rune kids, talking them down when their extreme emotions take them to a cliff’s edge. At the end of the day, as pitch black as A Plague Tale can be – and there are almost as many human corpses in the games as rodents – it delivers the hopeful message that human awfulness isn’t universal; that the help and emotional support of others can help with healing.

A sober but stunning AA gem like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, A Plague Tale: Requiem contains loads of bittersweet pleasures, but reaching them demands persistence from players. Fans of series like Horizon, Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider would seem to be the audience, and they should check it out, or at least the superior A Plague Tale: Innocence. However, they do need to be aware of the patience required to get to the (apparent) end of this powerful saga, memorable in multiple ways.

Nominated in five categories at The Game Awards 2022, A Plague Tale: Requiem is out now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch (through cloud gaming) and is playable with an Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscription.

In South Africa, you can also buy the physical edition of the game through these recommended retailers:

• Koodoo
• Nexus
• GAME4U