Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
Not perfect, but certainly a worthy successor for those keen to head back to the grim past to escape from our grim present.
It’s an interesting experience playing A Plague Tale: Requiem so soon after going through our own all-too-real version of a global pandemic. And while Requiem’s story combines a lot of fantasy with its historical drama – not to mention a veritable tsunami of disease-spreading rats – it gets one thing very correct indeed. That is: people act like a pack of mad bastards during periods of worldwide sickness. Illogical, fearful, violent and violently stupid, the homo sapien seems to retreat to a state composed of all its worst impulses. It’s a depressing fact of life, but it’s a great setting for a video game.
A Plague Tale: Requiem follows on from 2019’s A Plague Tale: Innocence, continuing the adventure of Amicia and Hugo de Rune as they look for a cure to the latter’s blood disease/generational curse, the symptoms of which include fatigue, dizziness and ratnados.
This time the pair are heading to Southern France, to find a (possibly) mythical island that keeps haunting Hugo’s dreams, all the while dodging the various bastards in the Inquisition and a mysterious group of alchemists known as the Order whose motivations seem murky at best.
Gameplay-wise, A Plague Tale: Requiem expands the original’s focus on stealth-based puzzle solving and light combat by giving Amicia a much expanded arsenal. This means most of the now much larger combat arenas can be tackled in a number of ways, although it usually boils down to “stealth until some wanker spots you and then fight like a mad bastard”. This is both a blessing and a curse, because while it’s nice to have more options, the titular innocence of the previous game is lost and replaced with a sort of Uncharted during the black plague vibe.
Requiem definitely feels like it’s trying to compete with the AAA big boys, and the ambition, while laudable, does lead this second outing feeling a little more generic at times.
That said, what you love is still here. Providing, of course, what you love is waves and waves of glistening rat bodies squirming with pestilence and ready to gnaw your salty flesh down to its cold hard bones.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is a slicker, bigger game than its predecessor that loses some of its rough charms but gains a more polished, albeit familiar experience. Plus, the ending is genuinely affecting and effective, even if the journey it takes to get there has a few too many tangents. Not perfect, but certainly a worthy successor for those keen to head back to the grim past to escape from our grim present.
