Console Corner: Review of Innocence: A Plague Tale

Look at the games Naughty Dog has released the past decade and their formula for success is clear: single-player, linear, action/story-based experiences with streamlined rpg elements. Make sure the story is good, channel it via a quality number of set pieces, give players simple but tasty options for interacting with the world, and voila, a success waiting to happen. Recognizing the formula for the potential it has, Asobo Studio created Innocence: A Plague Tale (2019).

But where Naughty Dog have gone down the road of post-apocalypse zombies and Indiana Jones-style action movies, Asobo goes Medieval. Set in Middle Ages France, players take on the role of Amicia, a teenage girl, and her younger brother Hugo as they try to survive the plague, the Inquisition, and something... else that is crashing across the land, wrecking havoc on towns and people. Villagers lock their doors to one another from the plague while the Inquisition's soldiers kill people randomly trying to find Hugo. The siblings journey takes them far from their home and into the company of people they never thought they would meet, all while the world seems to crash down around them.

Innocence: A Plague Tale saddles itself with an interesting challenge from the get go: to produce an action-adventure game with minimal direct violence. Players do not get guns, or bows and arrows, or cross-bows to perform head shot after head shot. Instead, players are given a sling and a steadily increasing variety of ammo with which to use the environment to do their dirty work for them. There are moments players do need to take down enemies in direct confrontation, but most often it's a stealth experience wherein Amicia's sling is used to find more subtle ways through the fields and castles. Satisfying the logical side of the brain more than the bloodthirsty, it's an interesting challenge indeed.

And the challenge wholly complements the small-scale realism of the game. Like another game The Order: 1886, Innocence: A Plague Tale time and again amazes the player with the quality of its scenes and set pieces, and how they fit into the specifics of the story. I will long remember sneaking and shooting my way through the Nazi zeppelin miles above the ground in The Order, just as I will remember my first trip through the rat-infested catacombs of the monastery in Innocence. It was possible to render both places in mundane fashion, but developers thankfully do an excellent job tailoring them to suit the needs of the game and story at hand.

But the Innocence: A Plague Tale still reminds me of most The Last of Us. Two characters, one female, one male, one older, one younger, helping each other through a harrowing existence. A simple but effective loop of collectibles which feed clothing and weapon upgrades. And a steady, chapter-like approach to story progress—each a mini-slice of that pushes the story at an excellently balanced pace. A Plague Tale is more stealth-oriented whereas The Last of Us is more shooty-shooty bang bang, nevertheless their clothing is cut from the same clothe.

I's difficult to say anything negative about A Plague Tale. I could whine about the lack of certain menu options many modern games offer, but sometimes (maybe more often) simpler is better. Technically, Plague Tale is a game that emerged from the womb fully formed. No bug fixes or updates were needed to 'make it good'--a fact we can be quick to overlook in today's gaming world. For a non-AAA title (+/-40 people made this game), the cinematics are much better than a person has a right to expect. Enemy and environmental hit points, grab points, menus, loot—all function as they should. And at roughly 10-12 hours of gameplay, the price is likewise on point. Really just a solid, all around, nicely polished and balanced package.

To this day I remain curious: what if the game The Order: 1886 had been released today, not at the beginning of the PS4's lifecycle? Would the weight of expectation have so thoroughly killed the game's release? Instead, would its fine polish, great story, and wonderful set pieces be praised for how good they in fact really are? We'll never know. But what we do know is that Innocence: A Plague Tale has its pedigree with Naughty Dog's games as its inspiration.