A Plague Tale: Requiem

A Plague Tale: Requiem is a sequel to the warmly welcomed action adventure game with well-defined stealth elements, released in 2019 - A Plague Tale: Innocence. The game was developed by the authors of the first part of the series, the Asobo Studio team, and was published by Focus Home Interactive.

Plot

A Plague Tale: Requiem once again takes us to medieval Europe. The action of this production is set in the 14th century, after the events depicted in the original. Amicia and Hugo, the siblings known from the original, along with their friends try to start a new life in the southern regions of France and forget the traumatic events of the past. However, it soon becomes apparent that the plague that struck these lands is not over yet, and neither are the wars tearing the country apart. Amicia must resume her search for someone who can help Hugo, facing adversity and fighting for her life.

Gameplay

In A Plague Tale: Requiem we observe the action from a third-person perspective (TPP). The adventure takes us through a variety of locations - from cities and villages, to picturesque isles and ancient ruins. While traversing them, we follow the storyline and solve environmental puzzles and deal with enemies - sneaking and, as a last resort, fighting.

Amicia has at her disposal the slingshot known from the original, and a multitude of projectiles with varying effects allows her to eliminate enemies as directly as she can turn elements of the environment into deadly traps. In addition, however, the girl makes excellent use of a crossbow - slow, but eliminating even armored opponents with a single shot - and has also learned to sneak up on adversaries and inflict a quiet (though brutal) death at close range, as long as he has a knife at hand. All this means that the protagonist often has the opportunity to turn from a victim into a hunter who hunts her enemies.

Things are different with the plague of hungry rats, which sometimes even flood the locations and destroy the surroundings and devour everything outside the range of light. Passing through places overrun by them requires the use of torches, constantly looking around and making sure that our path is well lit.

However, the presence of bloodthirsty rodents can be used to your advantage, for example, alchemical slingshot bullets will help lure rodents toward our enemies or extinguish sources of fire, the only protection against rats. In addition, Hugo's extraordinary abilities also come to the fore - thanks to his bond with the rats, we can use their senses to track the movements of our opponents and even briefly take direct control of the herd.

The game mechanics also include simple elements of crafting (making ammunition and upgrading equipment) and character development. The latter aspect is a novelty - Amicia's skills improve as she uses them, which translates into the automatic unlocking of talents in three trees, assigned to different play styles (focusing on killing enemies, sneaking and using alchemy).

Once the adventure is over, you can start it again in New Game Plus mode. From the start, you then have all the abilities and items that you gained in the previous game, but in return the difficulty level increases significantly (e.g. opponents are more easily alerted).

Graphics and music

A Plague Tale: Requiem features high-quality graphics. As before, the most impressive are the rats appearing here in truly frightening numbers (bigger than in Innocence). The extremely atmospheric soundtrack composed by Olivier Deriviere, known from the first A Plague Tale and Dying Light 2, also deserves a mention.