Release date: 14 may 2019

Developers&Producers: Asobo Studios, Focus Home Interactive

Website: http://aplaguetale.com/

Genre: medieval adventure

A Plague Tale: Innocence was announced two years ago as a game focused on storytelling. It’s absolutely false! Stealth and RPG mechanics are the core of the game. Basically it’s a not so good replica of Dishonored: the same unhealty atmosphere, the same stealth and RPG mechanics, the same attention to sorcery and supernatural, the same killing rats. The medieval setting reminds me of another stealth game: Thief. Dishonored is in First Person View, on the contrary A Plague Tale is in Third Person View; in fact A Plague Tale has two main protagonists acting together: the 15 y.o. Amicia and her little 5 y.o. brother Hugo. It tries to imitate somehow the particular relationship between the main protagonists of The Last Of Us, but results are disappointing.

Summing up with no spoilers, Amicia and Hugo have to face an horrible plague spread by hordes of ravenous rats and survive the Holy Inquisition. For the majority of the game, players need to utilize stealth to avoid hostile encounters. Amicia is equipped with a sling which can throw rocks to break drawbridge chains or stun guards long enough for the rats to ambush them, or even kill them with a headshot. The game is a series of survival puzzles, mostly consisting of methods to scare away or distract the hordes of hungry rats in order to gain access to new areas, or direct them towards enemies. The main method of warding rats off is fire, as rats will seldom enter within a radius of burning torches and braziers. Amicia can also craft special ammunition and supplies, which include fire-starting sulfur stones that ignite braziers, stink bombs that attract rats, or fire suppressants to extinguish torches carried by enemies. Amicia’s younger brother Hugo can be directed towards specific tasks when Amicia is busy. Later in the game, the player can assume control of Hugo, who cannot craft items but is able to control rats and sneak through small spaces. All these abilities are combined when the siblings unite in the late game. You’re adviced: mechanics and graphics are the best features of the game, the rest is forgettable!

A Plague Tale is not the great game that mainstream magazines claim for. Plausibility and consistence of plot, characters psychologies and relationships are completely sacrificed to challenges; situations are improbable and sometime grotesque, story is really weird, weak and absurd, full of incoherence and discrepancies. All the good premises of the prologue made me think of a good narrative adventure at first, but they get irretrievably lost as the game progresses and ridiculousness turns up. E.g., the ending Dragon-Balls-Z-like fight is just laughable! Dishonored has definitely better and more plausible story, characters and situations.

Protagonists are children but they don’t act always like children, the most of the time they act as adults! It seems that children are there just for speculation, for creating contrast between the dark, bloody, violent medieval context and the supposed innocence and fragility of children. The “innocent” Amicia killing hundreds of people with a toy sling will remain in the annals of Video Games! Completely laughable! In the prologue, the good and shy Amicia wasn’t even able to kill a boar with the sling; a few scenes after, she is able to kill soldiers with just one shot of her toy sling! She turns in a war machine able to defeat an entire army and win the Holy Inquisition with the help of a bunch of teens and children! Completely laughable! Characters are not real persons, they’re puppets that have to adapt behavior, thoughts, feelings and emotions to improbable tasks and situations. Some secondary characters are inserted just for creating artificial and predictable dramatic moments. No doubt the game is aimed at a not demanding audience of teens. Developers focused exclusively on challenges and environmental puzzles that compromise design and credibility of game world and conflict with characters and story. The latter is just a dressing, it has been built around challenges and mechanics and not the contrary; it has no contents to express, it has nothing to say, it is there just for badly supporting the fun, and the fun is just facing challenges with an end in themselves!

A Plague Tale cannot achieve the so called suspension of disbelief, as consequence player can never feel immersed in the experience. It’s not the only game falling in such mistake, let’s think of Tomb Raider Reboot. You’re the young Lara Croft learning to survive a wild nature and very bad people. You take a compelling path of growth, but at a certain point, towards the end of the game, credibility disappears and immersion gets lost! The need to engage players in extreme and bombastic challenges destroys the good story, the good psychology and atmosphere. Lara becomes a war machine, Rambo is nothing in comparison!! Gameplay falls into the obviousness of traditional challenges: shooting, bombing, fighting, killing, playing hide & seek, etc. A Plague Tale encounters similar problems.

You realize that something is wrong when you have to face senseless ending level boss! That completely destroys narrative breath and credibility, it’s just challenge for challenge’s sake! In order to make story interesting developers introduced alchemy and supernatural elements, but results are very weird and disappointing. Even the silly mechanic of rats invasion is there just for fun, for creating weird situations, challenges and puzzles, but it’s just ridiculous! A Plague Tale is not boring, on the contrary it is fun, but you cannot say it’s a smart game; it’s an entertainment product for masses, aimed at players searching for stealth, action, challenges, puzzles but not interested in story, contents, psichologies, relationships, feelings, emotions etc.

A Plague Tale is an indie game developed by Asobo Studios in France, but it has to be considered a triple A game because of the production supported by Focus Home Interactive. Asobo Studios are active since 2002, they are well known for games based on Disney cartoons, as Ratatouille, Wall-E, Toy Story 3 etc. etc. A Plague Tale comes with great graphics and animations, high quality cutscenes, good actors, long playtime around 12 hours; it’s a pity that such AAA resources were not used for creating a smarter experience.

Once again games like A Plague Tale put Video Games in a position of inferiority with respect to Cinema or Comics. Mainstream magazines are accomplices of such cultural “crime”; they welcomed the game with high ratings as one of the best surprise of 2019, underlining the narrative features! Absolutely false! It’s a silly game good just for fun and mass entertainment, with a low-medium intellectual level, aimed at a young audience with low expectations. I want to be clear: there are far worse games than this, all in all I didn’t mind playing it, I had some fun by taking a lot of screenshots in the very useful photo-mode! Trying to sell the game for its narrative features is a big mistake, it’s like making fun of and tricking the players.

A Plague Tale can be classified in the big limbo of AAA challenging games where story is just a bad dressing. I talked about conflictual relationship between challenges and storytelling in previous articles. Summing up, we can distinguish three main categories:

Games centered around challenges.

Most of games is centered around challenges and action, around what players would or could do in the game world just for easy entertainment; That’s good, but remember: such “instinctive, ludistic, egocentric and hedonistic” approach is not compatible with the holism of storytelling and expressive art. If you are indulging the simple instinctive and childish fun of shooting, fighting, jumping, running, solving puzzles, etc. it’s very very hard to build a suitable complex web of events, relationships, contents, thoughts, feelings, psychologies, dialogues, etc. etc.! Challenges are tasks with limited horizons, while stories and expression of serious contents need a wider and holistic breath. It makes more sense to develop exclusively challenging games without the presumption of telling stories. That’s the big mistake: trying to ennoble easy entertainment with pretentious stories badly attached to challenges.

Games melting challenges and narration.

A few games are good compromises of challenging and storytelling. Developers doesn’t give up on traditional challenges but first of all wants to express something deep, sometime not necessarily happy or fun. So they try to melt challenges and narration and build game worlds suitable for traditional interactivity but first of all for their narrative ambitions. Inside is a good example. Contents and story are the core of the experience, challenges are built around them, and not the contrary.

Games centered exclusively around stories and contents.

A few games are centered exclusively around storytelling and contents with no challenges at all. Story and contents are the pivot of the whole experience. Gameplay is developed to fullfil deep contents, smart plot, complex relationships, feelings, emotions, psychologies etc. Main purpose is expressive art with no compromises. What Remains of Edith Finch is a good example. Games are no more challenging toys, but become virtual interactive experience for mature people searching for art, smartness and intellectual satisfaction. Games are not only for fun, they can be also intellectual and cultural experiences. Gameplay, mechanics, interactivity, processing, games AI, graphics etc. are there for serving stories and contents!

Ok, that may sound revolutionary and pretentious to you. I know. VG market is very conservative. Peolple understand VG just as electronic toys still today. But I’m saying nothing new or heretic!

If you want to do Art, you have to finalize the medium to express deep intellectual contents and stories. That’s also true for movies, books, drama, comics, etc. etc. Don’t forget that video game is just a medium like book and movie. Not every book or movie is expected to be an artwork, the same for games. I’m not denying the tradition of Video Games as challenging electronic toys, I’m not saying that we don’t need challenging and traditional games. I’m talking of an expansion of gaming market and industry , something to add, not something to subtract. Easy mass entertainment and intellectual expressive art can coexist in Video Games just like in Cinema, Comics, Music or Literature!

A Plague Tale belongs to the first category, a challenge based game, but it fails in inserting a movie-like story at all costs. I’m not blaming traditional challenging games, I am blaming the claim to ennoble an easy entertainment product by inserting a bad narrative dressing at all costs. It betrays an inferiority complex of video games developers towards authors of films, comics and books. That’s wrong. It’s better to develop pure challenging games, just like in the golden era of arcades, than developing bad hybrids like A Plague Tale.

In conclusion I have some suggestions for young developers: if you want to develop a traditional challenging and fun game, don’t fall in the inferiority complex, don’t waste your time trying to insert at all costs a dressing story and expensive cut scenes with real actors. If you cannot do without story, insert just a vague and simple story line but don’t have the presumption of expressing something deep or involving players in movie-like complex storytelling. Just focus on challenges and fun. On the contrary, if you want to express deep contents or tell good stories with credible characters, you need no challenges, video game is not the same of challenge; just focus on characters, plot, feelings, psychologies, emotions, atmosphere, aesthetics, interactivity, narrative mechanics, in-game AI, immersion of player in interactive storytelling. If you cannot do without challenges, put at the center of the experience story, characters and contents, then builds a few challenges around them and not the contrary. Challenges should be the result of actions strictly linked to narration and not just for fun with an end in itself.

Ratings: 70/100 (This is an average rating; for info about ratings see here)