Yes, A Plague Tale: Innocence Is As Good As They Said – Xbox Series X/S Review
What makes A Plague Tale great is that it’s quite a complete package, made up of great characters, gameplay and cool technology – all set in 14th century France during a terrible plague. There simply aren’t enough linear stealth games these days, as most have leaned in the open-world direction, but A Plague Tale: Innocence proves that we’re all missing out terribly.
A free new-generation patch released, offering higher resolutions and 60fps, and now that we’ve played it, we think it’s time you finally played it too.
What’s Good With A Plague Tale: Innocence?
+ Great characters
+ Fun linear stealth puzzle-solving
+ Beautiful visuals
+ Incredible rat-horde technology
In A Plague Tale: Innocence, you play a young girl (Amicia) who helps her little brother (Hugo) escape an inquisition that is hunting him, after your villa is attacked, and family butchered. It’s a linear stealth game that mostly has you sneaking around, distracting guards to move through or utilising your sling and various tools and alchemy to either kill guards or extinguish fires, attract creatures and more.
The stealth itself is treated less like an exercise in creativity and free-will, and more like a straight up puzzle to solve using the tools at hand. It works so well, and allows the whole game to flow beautifully as the story unfolds.
Once the rat-hordes from the plague get involved, things get super interesting and you have to make use of light and fires (which keeps them at bay) to solve the areas and get through – offering fun game mechanics to toy with as well as incredible tech and visuals that can include literally thousands of rats scurrying on screen.
The tiniest gripe I had with the game was only a single checkpoint where a slightly out-of-character action sequence took place, with every death losing me progress on items I had collected, as well as a small story discovery and a very slow build up to the sequence that was frustrating to repeat. Aside from that tiny blemish, the gameplay, difficulty and pacing really stands out as nothing short of excellent.
