BENGALURU: The Plague Tale’ series is a medieval twist on the zombie apocalypse format, in that it is not zombies, but millions of slimy black rats. In the darkness, they haunt the cities, feasting on every moving being in sight. Their red eyes glow, and it may be the last thing anyone sees — except if they hold light. Amicia, Hugo, and Lucas have so far escaped and made it to game two. But will they survive ‘Requiem’ with all the new enemies and more unpredictable rat behaviour?
At the beginning of ‘Requiem’, we realise that not a lot of time has passed since the end of ‘Innocence’. Young Hugo is still very much young and sick and is promised respite from his illness in a new town. As they make their gruelling journey in the hope of success, we see a changed Amicia. If I thought Amicia did horrible things in game one, it’s nothing compared to her rage in this game. Seasoned by the brutality that her family had seen in the past year, Amicia is no longer the scared and quiet shadow that crawled past guards. She is fast to pull out her catapult to hurl stones at the target before the dull enemy turns around to say “Huh?”.
In keeping with Amicia’s new-found aggression brings a new gameplay improvement: unlimited stones in the ammunition bag. This is the first and best of a series of improvements in skill trees and inventory management that ‘Requiem’ brings. Innocence had a truly annoying side-mission hunt to search for rocks that would suit Amicia’s catapult with the added disadvantage of only a limited number of stones allowed in the inventory. This had seriously restricted the movement ability, especially if someone as impatient as me were to play the game. Besides infinite ammo, we also have workbenches which are more in the fashion of those we would see in games like ‘The Last of Us’ supplying a little flexibility on the combat experience that we’d like to have.
‘A Plague Tale: Requiem’ has a larger story, making the game almost twice as long as the first. This is great, because as much as I disagree with the way Amicia does things — I am truly invested in the lives and stories of all the people in the game and want more of it. It is currently available as part of the Xbox game pass subscription for the PC and Xbox, and also playable on the PlayStations, and the Switch.