A Plague Tale: Requiem – Zero Punctuation

You may recall A Plague Tale: Innocence was a stealth action game with crafting and collectibles (no open world though, only Jiminy Mockthroat at most) set in fourteenth century France in which breathy action girl with powerful reboot Lara Croft energy Amicia De Rune had to protect her younger brother Hugo who it turned out had the mystic ability to summon apocalyptic hordes of plague rats that he can just barely control as long as he continually receives head pats and lollipops. So in this sequel Amicia no longer has the excuse of ignorance as she repeatedly brings Hugo to densely populated areas and puts him in situations where he feels threatened. Usually in the form of being threatened, funnily enough, by some soldier or other, often with the same working class regional British accent. And so Amicia navigates an ongoing sequence of freshly-created apocalyptic hellscapes doing her best to worsen matters by cold-bloodedly murdering everyone with clearer ideas for childcare best practices.

There’s a lot of The Last Of Us about all this, it’s certainly got that Last of Us 2 vibe that the protagonist’s best course of action would be to just fucking stop, maybe bury themselves in the woods somewhere, but at least in Last of Us 2 there was the suggestion we weren’t supposed to agree with these grimy murdering twats. Requiem seems to think we should be on side with Amicia. Early on she and the fam take Hugo to a doctor who is very blatantly coded as a villain – arrogant, dismissive, looks like Ming the Merciless – and all the time he’s on screen I’m nodding along to everything he says. “We must isolate the boy and treat him according to current scientific understanding.” Yes! Great idea! Thank Christ Captain Sensible finally arrived. But then he does a medical thing that makes Hugo say “Ow,” and Amicia hears and decides she must get Hugo away from this unfeeling monster. This is part of a whole chapter where Amicia is sent out to get some herbs, which illustrates that Amicia can’t even pop down the chemists without getting caught in an apocalyptic battle for survival. And then she gets back holding up the medicine covered in blood and re-traumatized for the umpteenth time and her mum goes “What took you so long?” and it feels like something from Postal 2.

Amicia has reboot Lara Croft energy in multiple ways. First there’s the talking exclusively in breathy urgent whispers and I have misophonia for certain mouth noises so the dialogue always feels like there’s a dog licking my earhole out. I SAID EARHOLE. Also, she gets caught up in desperate survival situations with such anomalous regularity that at some point she’s got to accept some of the blame. I mean, a sane person would’ve maybe picked a different chemist than the one that’s under enemy lockdown on the far side of a hostile city. Hunted by psychotic mercenaries once, shame on you, hunted by psychotic mercenaries every twenty minutes, shame on me. See, also like reboot Lara Croft, an attempt to frame a character as strong and determined instead brings them across as psychotically hyperfixated beyond all rational sense or self-preservation instinct. Her motivation basically always comes down to “because question mark.” We must ignore doctor’s orders and take Hugo to the island he’s been dreaming about, which I know exists and will help him because question mark. Now we’re on the island we must follow in the footsteps of a previous historical plague rat whisperer, because question mark.

My pet canned apocalypse deserves a happy life because question mark. I have not powerbombed him down a concrete stairwell because question mark. Yeah, thanks, Father of the Year, can we hear something about the gameplay, now? Oh, that. Very little has changed from the first game, might as well just watch my old review. Bog standard Naughty Dog-brand string of arenas where you either go kill crazy straight away or make a token attempt at stealth first, interspersed with environmental or rat rearrangement puzzles that half the time your current pet NPC will just flat out tell you the solution to so it’s about as puzzling as the strange case of the torn up sofa cushion next to the small dog refusing to make eye contact. One addition is a new upgrade system where we acquire new abilities in the stealth, action or alchemy paths based on which approach to gameplay we use most. This is an idea RPG systems piss about with now and again, most prominently in games like Fable, and it always runs up against the logical issue that if I’m stealthing it up more often then it’s probably not my stealthing ability that needs help.

And if I keep fucking up and beating all the dudes to death with a stick and the game goes “Wow, you’re good with that stick, here’s some glitter to put on the end of it,” that’s going to feel like rubbing it in. It’s still a visually impressive game with its rat horde physics and destruction set pieces but you should know by now that as a narrative specialist I just can’t enjoy a game where the plot relies too much on contrivance and none of the character motives make sense. It doesn’t help that the game feels unnecessarily long, especially ‘cos at the very end, spoiler alert, Amicia resolves the plot by doing the thing I’d been fucking yelling at her to do since contrived action set piece one, and thus did the entirety of the last twenty-odd hours feel like so much senselessly wasted time and human life. You know those people who are really into Harry Potter, and base their entire worldview around it, and to whom one feels the need to say “READ ANOTHER BLOODY BOOK?” I think of Amicia the same way. FIND ANOTHER BLOODY SIX YEAR OLD. THIS ONE’S BROKE. Shouldn’t be hard, you’ve orphaned about five thousand of the fuckers. Just pick one. One who has a bad day because they shit themselves in a McDonalds and not because they triggered the Gray Goo Scenario.