Reviews
[Review] ‘A Plague Tale: Innocence’ is a Stunning, Solemn Story of Family and Responsibility
A fight to survive in Plague-ridden France makes for one of the year’s most captivating games. Bloody Disgusting’s A Plague Tale: Innocence review tells you why it must be played.
The history of Asobo Studio is a unique one. It’s not unfair to meet their latest work, A Plague Tale: Innocence, with skepticism when a quick scan of their development history reveals they’ve oscillated between playing supporting roles on other studio’s projects, like Remedy’s Quantum Break, and adapting movie tie-in games for Disney properties like Ratatouille and Wall-E. The transition from those jobs to a dark, grim, and unforgiving stealth-action game like A Plague Tale doesn’t seem like it would be a safe jump, but that’s part of what makes it so excellent. It’s a great game all on its own, truly one of 2019’s best single-player games. But more than that, it exists as Asobo’s coming-out party. This is a studio ready to make a name for itself.
A Plague Tale: Innocence tells the story of Amicia and Hugo, siblings by birth but virtual strangers by circumstance in 1348 amid the bubonic plague and the reign of The Inquisition. Hugo has lived his life with a mysterious illness to the point that he has almost unceasingly been quarantined and thus hardly knows anyone other than his mother and his doctor. In the early hours of the game, tragic fate brings the children side by side and suddenly Amicia is forced to go from adolescent joys like playing with her dog to the harsh reality of protecting her young and sickly brother on a journey that will test their will.
The story would fall flat without strong lead characters, and luckily Amicia and Hugo are nothing if not strong. The horrors they are met with very quickly in the story and throughout the game’s seventeen chapters are the kind that should rally anyone to their cause simply because they don’t deserve the world they’re given, but Asobo does well to flesh them out beyond that too, even if, like the basic premise, some of their interpersonal dynamics are sometimes too familiar. At its heart, A Plague Tale is a coming-of-age story and even as it can’t escape many of the tropes that come with that territory, it uses them well and does even subvert them at times.
While Amicia and Hugo are sympathetic characters and easy to root for all on their own, the game’s story is aided by the several secondary characters they meet on their journey, almost all of whom are also young children themselves. So few games put kids front and center like that, especially in such a macabre setting, and this makes A Plague Tale stand out in a sea of “bad dad simulators” that are so popular right now. There’s no complicated father figure here to save the kids this time, Amicia and Hugo have to do all their own saving, and the story is better for it.
Though we don’t often think of it as such now, it’s fair to call the times of The Black Death apocalyptic, and this exaggerated version of that era is even more fitting of the descriptor. In such a world, it wouldn’t make sense for the kids to fight back with swords and crossbows. Instead, Hugo is all but totally defenseless, while Amicia is armed only with her slingshot. Over the course of the game, new types of alchemical ammunition are made available due to the game’s blurring of fantasy and history, and much of the game consists of the children walking a tightrope of sneaking through darkness to hide from The Inquisition then scaring the disease-ridden rat swarms away with light.
The game adds new elements at precisely the right pace, with crafting, enemies, and encounters all evolving intuitively and in immensely satisfying ways. Just as you’ve mastered one kind of enemy or one way to circumvent the rat swarms, a new wrinkle is introduced, adding complexity and rewarding players again and again to overcome each obstacle. The stealth works well as the main gameplay component, though some decent boss battles are interspersed too. Asobo credited Naughty Dog as inspiration for their story-driven game and it shows. The game employs some of the same tricks as Sony’s best studio and if you agree imitation is flattery, you’ll find some familiar elements that are nothing but enjoyable.
All of the A Plague Tale’s great story and gameplay bits are aided by the rest of its art and audio too. The actors do an admirable job portraying the characters, solid, if not exactly spectacular. Truly every moment from open to close is full of rich atmosphere due to the game’s visuals, which include excellent lighting and environments that remain grimly enchanting even as you walk among piles of corpses. Composer Olivier Deriviere once again delivers a somberly stunning original soundtrack giving the game the final puzzle piece it needed to complete the picture of one of the year’s most memorable games.
If you don’t know the name Asobo Studio, you will after A Plague Tale. They clearly had a vision for what they wanted this game to be and despite the presumably lower budget than similar games, it rarely feels hamstrung by financial constraints. It’s a game that looks, sounds, and plays great, and is all wrapped up in a story that unfolds irresistibly. For anyone who still longs for single-player games they can just sink their teeth into and enjoy, A Plague Tale should shoot to the top of your list. It’s one of the year’s best games.
A Plague Tale Innocence review code provided by the publisher.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is out May 14 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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