A Plague Tale: Requiem PC Review 9/10 "Requiem goes hard on disgusting environments and intense squalor" 🐀 @APlagueTale

It’s estimated that the Black Death killed around 25 million people when it tore through Europe in the 14th century. You’ll see most of those corpses in A Plague Tale: Requiem, which doesn’t miss an opportunity to toss you into a charnel house bristling with rotting bones, have you clamber over giant heaps of fly-ridden bodies, or simply gently float downstream on an otherwise peaceful riverboat cruise as dead peasants serenely bob around you.

Just as in the excellent A Plague Tale: Innocence, Requiem goes hard on disgusting environments and intense squalor, all rendered with such glistening detail that you can practically hear the rot squelch beneath your feet. There’s a sequence early on where you and a buddy slide down into a dark crimson pit of decaying matter. Your companion retches and miserably says “I got some in my mouth...”.

By the end of the game, you’ll know how he feels...

As in Innocence, you play sling-happy French teenager Amicia de Rune. She’s utterly devoted to her younger brother Hugo, who’s inflicted by a mysterious magical disease known as the ‘Macula’, which is destroying his body while also giving him supernatural control of the hordes of rats that infest every dark corner of the world.

Your goal is to cure him and if that means murdering hundreds of people by caving their heads in with a rock, burning them alive, impaling them with a crossbow, or setting hordes of starving rats upon them so be it. Sure, maybe a town or two gets sucked into a giant underground chasm full of rats along the way, but hey, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

As you play a teenage girl up against armoured soldiers, large portions of the game are spent in stealth. Getting through the environments requires manipulating soldiers by creating distractions, scurrying through long grass, and being as quiet as possible. Requiem isn’t troubling Metal Gear Solid for stealth creativity but most encounters can be approached in a variety of ways, with the game awarding bonuses depending on whether you’ve ghosted through an area or left a trail of bodies in your wake.

Developers Asobo Studio has also developed far more confident pacing, mixing up tense action with relaxed chapters that let you explore an environment at your leisure without having to worry about rats or soldiers. These interludes make the inevitable plunge back into the nightmare that much more harrowing and - just as in The Last of Us - arriving in a safe place is tinged with dark anticipation about how quickly - and how badly - things are about to go to hell.

All that’s bolstered by some of the finest art direction in any recent game and a huge variety of places to explore. The opening hours will be familiar to anyone that’s played the first game as you creep through a medieval town evading rats and guards, but things soon open up into a stunning beach-front adventure, a technicolour Mediterranean seaside village, dense forests, and heavenly rolling pastures. Everywhere you go you feel the weight of history upon you, with the game putting recent Assassin’s Creeds to shame in depicting Roman ruins retrofitted for medieval use.

And then there are the rats. Innocence’s writhing hordes were already eye-catching, but Requiem takes things to the next level with tides of them bursting from the scenery and tearing the world apart. They’re a technological marvel though, like the characters, you’ll soon them as much as opportunities to cause chaos as obstacles. Requiem even goes full Uncharted at points in which you sprint towards the camera as fountains of rats burst out of every available hole and demolish the world around you.

But, for me, the star of this show is Charlotte McBurney’s Amicia. By the time the last game ended she had officially seen some shit go down, and this game builds on that solid foundation to create a determined and skilled heroine who slowly crumbles from within with each setback. McBurney nails the role on every conceivable level and her performance adds an emotional dimension that keeps you pushing onward into the inky darkness.

I loved seeing the other characters becoming understandably worried about Amicia’s growing homicidal tendencies, which are best exemplified in a brilliant early scene where she’s had enough of being chased around by soldiers and goes on a roaring rampage of revenge while screaming that she’s mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. This will come after a few hours spent crouching in a bush waiting for a guard to move and is supreme catharsis.

Sadly there are a few flaws. On several occasions, items and scenery that were supposed to be interactable weren’t, which resulted in me running around a barn for ten minutes unable to leave because the prompt to open the door didn’t appear. This is fixed by restarting the checkpoint and feels like something that can easily be addressed in a patch, but even so, little glitches like these are an unwelcome smudge on an otherwise pristine canvas.

But by the time the game wraps up with a genuinely epic closing act Requiem has cemented itself an odyssey that leaves its predecessor - and most of 2022’s other games - in the dust.