During the Dutch Revolt of 1566-1648, there was a brutal Geuzen general named Diederik Sonoy, who was said to have used rats as a torture for captured soldiers. He would take a hungry rat, a clay bowl and charcoal ashes from a nearby fire and show them to the accused. Rats – deliberately starved to death and separated from other creatures – will be placed on the naked bodies of prisoners. The bowl will be placed on the rat with the charcoal on it. As it desperately tries to escape, the rat gnaws at the victim’s intestines. Normally, both the rats and the prisoners would die. It is futile for rats to be sabotaged for self-preservation.
That’s it A Plague Tale: Requiem It feels like; your protagonist duo, Amicia and Hugo, are mice. As they panic and flee from death and disease they cannot escape, they tear a path of near-unbelievable destruction in 14th-century France. They wreaked havoc on the fragile body of a nation torn apart by war, plague, famine and death. Cruelty and inhumanity pushed them forward as the world fell apart behind them, and in a show of kindness, they caused the most horrific damage you could possibly see in a video game this year.
A Plague Tale: Requiem isn’t for the faint of heart — and not just because developers can summon 300,000 mice on screen at once. The central story is a grim reflection on an inherently cruel human being. This is a story about how even the brightest and most caring among us are pushed to their limits and become unhinged; violent, disaffected and savage. It’s a game that understands what it makes you do — how it makes you kill, even if you don’t want to — and uses that guilt to make you and your characters suffer. In A Plague Tale: Requiem, you’re a rat, forced through the body of a France that only knows grief, and you find you can’t stop eating — no matter how much it hurts you.
Charlotte McBurney brings this poignant and hopeless tale to life with his exemplary performance as he plays the player character Amicia with the backing of big-name actors like Kit Connor, among others . Developer Asobo Studio, you’ll know him in Microsoft Flight Sim, he’s also doing some more advanced work on animation and rigging; sometimes the facial expressions are so good you forget you’re playing and may be convinced that Is some specialized CGI movie or something. One moment in particular — Amicia recalls an outbreak of violence that would have dire consequences in the coming days — really showed Asobo’s shrewdness with its technology. Amicia’s eyes seem to freeze as she dissociates, then they refocus and she’s back in the present.
Between the touching script and the emphatic moments of a movie like this, you’d be tempted to compare Requiem to Sony’s mega-production—God of War, The Last of Us, A Plague Tale: Requiem. It’s an unlikely trilogy, but in some ways, the impact of this double-A gem is as important as its genre-defining counterparts. But all that focus on storytelling, historical detail and visual fidelity means there are few blind spots elsewhere.
It’s a bigger undertaking than its prequel, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and by a considerable margin. Some chapters are more open-ended than any previous chapter in the series (to great effect; play the pinwheel puzzle before diving into the no-go – all of which you can see from some open, flowery fields are phenomenal feats), but In doing so, the inexplicable tightness of Innocence’s orchestrated stealth collapsed, like a viaduct crumbling under the weight of some 300,000 mice.
Requiem makes you kill. It will kill you too. But Asobo never does it with a sadistic eye — it’s not Edios’ sleazy Tomb Raider. In death you learn. Maybe a swarm of rats gnawing at you when you wrongly judge how long your fickle, burning torch will last. Or maybe a guard saw you a second late and stabbed you with his spear. But next time, you know how to approach the world—maybe you’ll find some grass to hold your breath as the patrol passes by, or you’ll use your meager resources to fire a bunch of rats to get you safe passage.
Pure invisibility – often imposed on you – is readable, engaging, and lives up to the fantasy of being a frustrated teenage girl who will stop at nothing to save her troubled brother. But as the world continues to hurt Amicia, she is determined to hurt it. Knives, crossbows, and deadly kills are all her skills now. For better or worse. Narratively speaking, killing endless hired thugs by feeding them to rats or throwing stones at their heads actually works—not Lara Croft’s (2013) ludo-narrative dissonance. Your allies grimly understand your anger, your perverse desire to kill, and your enjoyment of it. Sometimes, you even have it stamped on them. After all, mice have to be fed.
It just doesn’t always make sense in games. Some parts of Requiem are more open world; there is a goal at the end, and you need to get there. Can you make way with a mouse? Will you kill everyone on the way? Or will you be sneaking all the way? The choice is usually yours, and usually – like all good stealth games – your improvised strategy burns out in a barrage of torchlights, raised voices, and blood. But in trying to impose stealth mechanics, combat engagements, cameo character abilities, the “floor is lava” system, and light and dark physics challenges into one engagement, the game sometimes feels like a goose, tethered and force-fed, the result is more like Offal instead of foie gras.
But aside from the tedious and overloaded choose-your-own adventure part, the game knows the rhythm. Easily done (at a brisk pace) in under 18 hours, Requiem never surpasses its popularity, and uses Uncharted-like downtime deftly to introduce you to a gorgeous, detailed music that always feels on the brink of destruction world. The most human stake – your dear brother’s life – is constantly weighed against other humans, other creatures, your own life… and the fears you face grow more and more as Amicia moves forward The greater the detachment and the insanity, as compelling as any movie you see in Cannes or Tribeca.
Rats often show despair. As those creatures who frayed their claws by desperately scratching for survival, or devoured their claws through the hot, wet flesh of the blind alive, in the hope that they would see freedom again. Requiem feels like a game, not only built around mice, but based on them. It asks, “What if the rat under the bowl had a conscience?” Its commentary on the nature of humans—and how similar we might be to chattering, mindless pests—will be with me for years to come. Asobo should be proud of what it has accomplished in this game, as frustrating as it is fascinating.
