A game about a pandemic would’ve hit different right now no matter what else was going on in its plot, but A Plague Tale: Requiem is a full-on swan dive into the most spiritually damning parts of living in a time of mass death in ways that no other entertainment has yet to attempt. Where A Plague Tale: Innocence was a fairly straightforward tale of survival about a teenage girl keeping a child alive in the worst of times—more than a few people rightfully but lovingly called it The Rats of Us—Requiem is an exercise in purposeful futility.
We know damn well that our teenage heroine, Amicia, isn’t nearly capable, measured, or even strong enough to protect her five-year-old brother, Hugo, from the worst that the world has to offer, or from shouldering the unfortunate blame that the Black Plague is all his fault. As such, Requiem asks the question: Is there any use or utility in even trying?
That’s a hard question to answer, and not just because of how unmerciful Requiem can be as a stealth experience. When the game starts, Amicia, Hugo, their mother, Beatrice, and alchemist-in-training Lucas have found a tiny, isolated place in France to hole up. It becomes clear, though, that isolation hasn’t cured Hugo’s supernatural affliction, and that the problems of the world will find them no matter where they are. And thus begins a new quest to find Hugo a cure.
For what it’s worth, Amicia is much better equipped to deal with the tasks at hand than before. Her bag of tricks in Innocence is more about subterfuge than fighting, and while those same tools are still at play in Requiem, Amicia now enjoys a greater measure of flexibility, thanks to much larger playing fields for the series’s stealth sections, and a small but appreciable array of makeshift weaponry. Amicia still can’t pick up a sword and slay her enemies—the fact that she can’t is the crux of one of the game’s most harrowing scenes—but her sling now carries infinite ammo. And if she finds a knife, and if she can get close enough to her enemy, she can drive it deep into their neck. Later, she even gets a crossbow to pick off enemies at a distance.
Perhaps most importantly, though, she has friends—temporary companions who are able to fight off enemies in close-quarters combat using a proper sword, or light the way forward. Thing is, nearly everyone, including Hugo, finds themselves deep in denial about their chances, and every moment spent traipsing through the pastoral French countryside taking down 14th-century sellswords is a risk, escalating the very real possibility of Hugo’s affliction flaring and bringing a nearly infinite legion of plague-ridden rats down on the cities of men.
The only breadcrumb that seems to be worth following is Hugo’s own fever dreams, of an island adorned by stone phoenixes, where he appears to be at peace. As one can guess a mile away, this isn’t what it seems, but just getting there is an odyssey in and of itself. It’s a lot of work solving Requiem’s myriad Rube Goldbergian puzzles just for the infinitesimal chance that salvation for Hugo is around the next corner, and the midsection of the game gets arduous as a result. We know where the story of this mysterious island will lead, and despite some beautiful, eerie, and astonishingly morbid tableaus, getting there takes a couple of meandering twists and turns too many to stay as engaging as the game is at the start and toward the end.
Yet as Requiem’s scope takes shape and the game finds its focus, it becomes harder to look back at the slower patches with any sort of enmity. And those moments, of Amicia taking out her rage on her enemies, of Hugo springing to life for small stretches at a time just to collect flowers or scare away birds, or a former enemy confessing his failures to no one in particular, serve a purpose. It’s not hope for the future that Amicia fights for, but preparation for a guiltless end—the ability to hold onto hope just long enough to confront morbid truths with a ready heart.
That’s a tricky tone to nail, especially for the motley crew standing by Amicia’s side by the end, many of whom we’ve just met in Requiem. It’s an especially hard ask of the narrative for the island cult leaders who wind up as the ultimate villains. But it’s a tone that the game manages to sustain throughout. Requiem’s ultimate premise depends upon giving its main characters lives and adventures for them to regret or remember fondly. That effort would count for nothing if the game didn’t let the children at the center of its tale be children as long as they can, or if it denied these people the chance to do the most human thing imaginable: that is, to try.
Requiem is still a rough experience, especially for anyone who’s seen young loved ones fade away in the last few years, but it’s an allegorical experience that has value and power, especially in light of that. In the end, the eponymous requiem in question is a quite literal violent scream, giving way to sorrow, but ultimately acceptance and thanks for the time given.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Sandbox Strategies on October 17.
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