A Plague Tale: Requiem is the sequel to the second game I ever reviewed. In my now-cringeworthy review, I came away from A Plague Tale: Innocence with an unexpected attachment to its two main characters, siblings Amicia and Hugo. Their heartbreaking quest to find peace in a bleak vision of Medieval France was the best part of the game, even when the story around them wasn’t always up to the task. Three years later, we finally get to see what Amicia and Hugo got up to after they got on that cart. I’ll try to make less references to spaghetti this time.

Picking up 6 months after the end of Innocence, Requiem finds teen Amicia, her 5 year old brother Hugo and their fellow survivors trying to find a way to cure Hugo of the Macula, the mysterious illness that has been deteriorating his body since birth. After some initial joy, reality comes crashing down on our characters, as they once again find themselves chased by bad guys while a plague of rats devastates everything around them. 

Once again, the relationship between Amicia and Hugo is the most compelling part of A Plague Tale: Requiem. Hugo’s worsening sickness parallels Amicia’s worsening mental health, as they barely get time to rest between excruciating situations. And unlike the first game, the story in Requiem finally feels deserving of their rich relationship. Innocence was too preoccupied with hiding, then revealing its supernatural twist. Now that the secret’s out, the narrative can focus more on the characters. Charlotte McBurney and Logan Hannan return as the English voices of Amicia and Hugo, and their performances are stellar, McBurney’s in particular. 

Developer Asobo Studio have crafted a confident narrative that honours the first game by answering a lot of its lingering questions, and ends with a tantalising possibility for the future of the series. The writing is strong, and goes in unexpected, satisfying directions. I enjoyed the story, even as it reaches Game of Thrones-levels of torture porn towards the end. 

It’s a positive, then, that the end of A Plague Tale: Requiem is more interesting than how it starts. Long after the game’s tutorials have ended, the first few chapters get repetitive quickly. The game takes too long on slow, tense moments with obvious horror tropes, while setting up the primary conflicts. 

But even with more options, stealth is still disorganised. There’s no clear way to see enemies around corners or through walls, so it takes some trial and error to figure out how to get to the exit, made especially harder if you want to detour towards collectibles. Getting spotted by enemies is no longer an instant 1-hit game over, but Amicia can still die easily at their hands, so I learned to beeline to the end at every stealth section.

Combat is perhaps the game’s weakest element. Each enemy type must be defeated in a specific way, and can kill Amicia in just a couple of hits.  In the moments the game makes it mandatory to defeat waves of baddies in a row, it’s overwhelming to juggle them all. Amicia’s trusty slingshot returns, but it’s slow to aim, and getting hit triggers a long, jerky animation before you can move again. As with stealth, I understand A Plague Tale: Requiem is a horror game, and is conveying that horror through oppressive mechanics, and at that the game is successful. But the controls make it hard to tell how much of this oppression is intentional, as opposed to how purposeful the writing is.

But there’s a saving grace for noobs like me. In a particularly stressful combat section, I turned to one of the game’s accessibility options: Invincibility Mode, which makes you take no damage from humans. Every time you turn Invincibility Mode on, the game reminds you that it will “degrade the experience” of the game, which it definitely does,  but I found it helpful for the moments where I died many times and went “ok, fine, I get it, he’s trying to kill me.”

Most of your interactions with the rats involve solving puzzles to get through them. As before, they are repelled by light, so you need to figure out how to use it to your advantage. Amicia’s slingshot is arguably more useful in puzzles than combat, as the different types of ammo she can craft affect the rats in unique ways. Some stealth sections also require you to contend with humans and rats at once, leading to rewarding moments where you can sic the rats on an unsuspecting soldier. 

Fresh off 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator, Asobo Studio have made another gorgeous game. A Plague Tale: Requiem clearly doesn’t have that Gates money behind it, but it’s still very nice to look at. Every daytime section is detailed and colourful, and every night is effectively terrifying. 

Unfortunately, a handful of glitches took the shine off of certain elements of Requiem. One puzzle solution didn’t appear because it was triggered by character dialogue that never activated, leading me to reload a checkpoint. Rats sometimes appear in places they shouldn’t, but if you die or reload a save, they won’t appear there again. One major visual glitch – which I won’t spoil – made quite a tense mid-game scene accidentally funny, which persisted even after I reloaded a checkpoint.

And speaking of the checkpointing system, it’s as inconsistent as I remember it in Innocence. One early puzzle requires pulling a lever, then listening to some dialogue before the next section. I failed the puzzle and was sent back to before I pulled the lever, which meant waiting for the same dialogue to end. But sometimes the game will smartly return me to the middle of a large stealth section, so I don’t have to redo anything I’d already done. When it’s good, it’s good, but it isn’t always.