"A Plague Tale: Requiem" Review - Like "The Last of Us: Part II", but Good!

Available for: Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch via cloud

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

As much as I enjoyed 2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence, I'm not sure I would've said "yes" if asked if it needed a sequel. I believe the sentiment is probably shared among most people: the original game was excellent by itself, it didn't need a sequel. But here we are in 2022, and developer Asobo Studio has returned with just that, accompanied by a vastly increased budget, and responses have been generally positive but with caveats. So, what's my take? Let's find out.

In A Plague Tale: Requiem, we once again assume the role of Amicia de Rune, a mid-to-late teenaged noblewoman in 14th century France. At the start of the game, Amicia is traveling with her mother, her friend Lucas, and her little brother, Hugo, to a port town said to be the home of an order of mysterious alchemists who may be able to help Hugo with his condition. That "condition" being an ancient blood curse called "The Macula," which allows him to control the rats that bring about that titular plague. Without help, Hugo, despite being a little boy of maybe 6 at most, is a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, sense the rats have a tendency to follow him and because he unintentionally causes massive influxes of rats when he becomes emotional. So, the crew seeks this group of alchemists, and when they arrive in town, they're gifted a beautiful house overlooking the port, and things seem to be looking up! But it's 14th century France, therefore nothing goes right and everything is awful, and from there we have our story. Now, several people have drawn comparisons between this game and Neil Druckmann's 2020 torture porn experience, The Last of Us: Part II, and if you look closely its easy to see why. Like that 2020 disgrace, Amicia becomes so single-minded in her quest to save Hugo that she makes some truly questionable decisions. Furthermore, just like Ellie, Amicia goes down some dark, extremely violent paths. If Ellie murdered anyone and everyone standing in the way of her revenge, Amicia murders anyone and everyone who stands in the way of whatever objective to help Hugo she's looking for this time. But I think that these comparisons should be used to show how Requiem succeeds in doing what Part II struggles to do. Just like Ellie, Amicia goes through violent bursts of rage and kills left and right, but that's not all she does the whole time. She's constantly having to work on gaining control of herself, and every fit of rage is accompanied by periods of remorse, of having to be the right kind of role model for Hugo and reconcile with the fact that at times she acts no better than the soldiers she takes out. So there's the morally not-great state the protagonist is in, just like in Part II, but it consistently gets called into question. And do you know what else? The game also doesn't have to resort to having npcs call out to their dead friends by name and lament how their hopes and dreams will never be fulfilled in order to establish that other people have feelings and therefore killing willy nilly is wrong. It also doesn't feature pregnant women getting beaten up every two seconds, because writers who aren't Neil Druckmann know that that's a silly hack move. Now...does the game preach a bit too much on this point, just like Part II does? Yes. But it's more isolated to one segment, and it isn't manipulative about it. I don't particularly care to be told that I did a bad thing by killing a slaver, because that's a good thing to do, but that's really the extent of how the game slaps you on the wrist for it. There's just some dialogue about it, we don't have to watch the slaver's children run up to his dead body sobbing and saying that he was going to take them to pick flowers tomorrow to lay on the grave of their mummy who had died just yesterday in a horrible accident (like Druckmann probably would do, and also their mummy was pregnant). But I've harped on this point a bit too much, so let's leave it at this: Requiem tells a sometimes hard-to-digest, difficult story with a lot of emotion behind it, but it does so tastefully and with adequate respect given to its characters.

Another comparison I've seen made between the two games I've been talking about is that, like in Part II, the gameplay formula barely deviates from the original game. This comparison, again, is accurate. Like in the original game, in Requiem you'll spend the runtime stealthing past guards, solving puzzles, trying to make it through swathes of rats, or some combination of these. At your disposal, you have a handful of alchemical agents you can add to rocks in your sling for various results. For instance, you can use these agents to put out fires, reducing visibility and allowing rats to travel to more areas, or you could use a different agent to temporarily make a fire brighter, thus blinding your foes or creating a bigger safety window from the rats. In any given area, the choice is up to you, but your supply of any given alchemical agent is limited to the resources you've picked up, so you'll need to use them wisely! So if you enjoyed the gameplay of the original title, you're likely to enjoy this as well. I've heard some reviewers say that the game's extended length compared to the first one causes the combat to wear out its welcome, but I didn't feel like that was the case. So I should qualify that previous statement by adding "you'll likely enjoy this as well because it's what you enjoy for about twice as long." There is a caveat to even this, however, and that's the late-game emphasis on prolonged combat sequences. There are a handful of sequences in the late game that, as I've already implied, are forced combat sections. There's no option for stealth, it's just open combat from beginning to end...and I hated all of them. You'll spend these segments sprinting around an arena, moving just barely faster than the enemies and trying to kill them all in inventive ways (because enemies with helmets, for example, can't be killed with your sling). And you die in either one or two hits depending on the enemy type, but a "hit" essentially means "got too close". So if an enemy gets too close to you, you get locked in an animation where they hit you and you take damage. With this in mind, it's incredibly hard to avoid getting hit if you get bottlenecked in these arenas (which you often will).

At the time I'm writing this very sentence, I've had my toes dipped in Pokemon Scarlet, so when I say this game looks amazing and you'd never guess it comes to us from a AA studio, I f***ing MEAN this game looks amazing and you'd never guess it comes to us from a AA studio. The graphical quality of everything in this game (the environments, the faces, the animations, the textures, etc) is top notch stuff that stands alongside this year's best technical packages! That being said, the framerate is capped at 30fps, which isn't a dealbreaker, but at times it doesn't seem to quite hit even that mark. It's not like the framerate fluctuates horribly, but there were a couple times where I noticed small dips. So while the game definitely looks like a AAA product, there is that little caveat there to set expectations properly. Adding onto that is the overall clunkiness of the game. The act of actually moving around in the game world isn't unpleasant, per-se, but when you find yourself in open combat it can be easy to end up dying because Amicia doesn't control as smoothly as you would expect by looking at the graphics. To close out this little discussion of the technical negatives, I have to say that the checkpoint system, while not the worst I've ever seen, is pretty frustrating at times. It isn't that it puts you too far back, rather that it places checkpoints at the most annoying times. Whether a couple of easy challenges away from a hard challenge or at the very beginning of one of those prolonged combat sequences, a lot of times death can mean having to do either mundane things or extremely complicated things over and over again.

Folks, nobody was asking for this sequel, and I think if it had never been made the world would be no worse off. But I find that, having now finished it, it was a worthwhile experience and a respectable expansion of the original game's story and concept. Some may find that the greater length causes the formula to wear out its welcome, and some may find Amicia's single-mindedness in her quest to save Hugo just as distasteful as Ellie's in Part II. These aren't my takeaways, but they seem to be common enough to be worth noting. When all is said and done, in spite of a few bad choices in encounter design and some ways that the game reminds you it's a middle shelf title, A Plague Tale: Requiem is an achievement the likes of which we don't usually see from developers like this.

Let us review:

-Late game combat sections - 1.0

-Technical woes -  0.5

-Slight holier-than-thou messaging - 0.2

The final score for A Plague Tale: Requiem is...  

8.3/10 - Great

Good work, Asobo Studio, good work!