The game starts in Provence, and they land in Arles soon after. Their last outing was in Aquitaine, which was about as colourful as a breastplate thanks to the Hundred Years’ War. A chance for the art director, Olivier Ponsonnet, to pay homage to the yolk-yellow pastures Van Gogh dotted and daubed in that part of the country five centuries later. This kind of specific snapshot of time and place is rare outside of Assassin’s Creed. That’s a big swerve between projects. Bing’s map data let us cruise over the whole damn planet, and I like to imagine Hugo and Amicia under the wings of a Boeing 787 as they go through their trials.
What’s the deal with those travails? It’s the Macula, which lurks in Hugo’s bloodstream and links him – telepathically, or maybe magically – to swarms of rats. However, rats had a bad PR at the time, so the duo was hounded by certain governmental offices, like the French Inquisition. On the plus side, Hugo now has rodential powers. When stressed, he can summon the furious horde in a geyser-like burst, guiding them toward hapless soldiers.
With Requiem, you can render hundreds of thousands of rats at once on next-gen consoles and PCs. There are two conclusions I can draw from this. This is how we’ll measure hardware’s forward surge from now on. Tell me about your improved tail tech and the new Unsqueal Engine, not resolutions and frames per second. Second, given the crummy subtitles these games have, the developers must be pissed that Warhammer got “Vermintide”.
He’s plagued by head-cracking visions of an island that he believes might cure his condition. The boy’s mother, Béatrice, wants to take him to the Order, a coven of alchemists who study the Macula. Magister Vaudin, the Order’s local rep, is rude, unsmiling, and indifferent to Hugo’s problems. In Vaudin’s eyes, and possibly to the Order as a whole, the lad is less a patient to be comforted than a lab rat for curiosity’s sake. They break away from Béatrice, join forces with a former soldier and a pirate, and try to make their way to La Cuna, which is said to be an island.
As a result, we get another helping of puzzles and stealth, both of which feel prescribed, but are oddly satisfying. Soon after you meet a guard, you’re given the means to deal with him. Typically, you can lure him away by hitting an armour-filled chest with a rock; pelting a table or low opening with a rock; or extinguishing a torch, inviting nearby rats to eat it. There’s no sense of casting your own solution, as in games like Thief or Splinter Cell (both of which play with morality and mechanics). It’s more like clipping together perfectly animated passages of game design.
Still, if you liked A Plague Tale: Innocence and want more rats, Requiem is a must. It’s not just that there are more little beasts: “They’re faster!” They’re more agile! It’s smarter! But the game itself is the same. More sights, better graphics, and more of it (about 18 hours, compared to the first’s 10) but the basic hook is the same. Just wish Asobo wasn’t so scared to turn off the autopilot sometimes. The puzzles are mostly lever-pulling, torch-igniting stuff, and Lucas or Amicia will call out exactly what you need to do.
