A Plague Tale: Innocence (

2019

)

I hate how the bow and arrow have become the default weapon of choice for female action protagonists. Obviously, you have Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (2012), and the ginger chick from Brave (2012). Then there's Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn [2017] and Horizon Forbidden West [2022]. Ellie from The Last of Us [2013] and The Last of Us Part II [2020] does use pistols and rifles from time to time but in the marketing material she always shows up with the bow and arrows front and center. Hell, even Laura Croft replaced her signature dual-pistols (a no less absurd trope but infinitely more stylish) with a bow and arrow for Tomb Raider [2008] and the ensuing sequels and cinematic adaptation.

Now, there's nothing wrong with giving your character a bow and arrow. Indeed, even in a modern setting, there are reasons to use an iron-age hunting implement for reasons of both logistics and characterization. If you need a silent ranged weapon for extended stealthy missions in the wilderness then a bow might be an ideal choice. It has the twin advantages of being much quieter than a firearm and using ammunition that can be made without needing much in the way of tools. It would also be useful if you want to portray the character wielding it as a man out of time, a primitive savage adrift in the modern world like in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). However, it's a queer go-to choice for a female-specific weapon as the bow requires tremendous upper-body strength to use. Obviously, fiction doesn't have to be 100% realistic, and I'm happy to simply pretend for the duration of a video game or movie that all the ladies onscreen are just as strong as the men around them. However, if that's the case why not have the girls kitted out with swords and boards, slugging it out in melee with the boys?

Besides, as we can see in today's game there is a much better ranged option if your only goal is to turn a 100-pound teenage girl into a credible martial threat: The sling. In retrospect, I'm amazed I didn't think of it before, as the sling has been associated with unequal contests of strength since the old testament days! It has all the advantages of a bow and arrow, being mostly silent and with a source of ammunition (rocks) so plentiful that it might as well be infinite. It's also surprisingly deadly in the hands of a skilled wielder, as one good shot to the head is usually more than enough to incapacitate or outright kill the target. It doesn't require as much physical strength to use as a bow and arrow, though it does require a good deal more finesse and skill to actually wield effectively. Props to the Frenchies over at Asobo Studio for giving us this instead of yet another cliché bow-girl.

Our sling-wielding heroine is Amicia de Rune, the daughter of a minor French noble living in Aquitaine during the Hundred Years War. For reasons that are not made clear Amicia and her father have been living apart from her mother Beatrice and her sickly little brother Hugo. We learn that the family has been separated for so long that Amicia does not actually know her brother at all. Indeed, when she broaches the subject with her father in the game's prologue he quickly becomes evasive. Clearly, something is going on here that the adults are unwilling or unable to tell Amicia about, and likewise, the game itself shows admirable restraint in cluing the player in on what is going on, indeed even at the end of all the proceedings we won't know exactly what the elder de Runes were up to. It's a simple and effective way of placing the player in Amicia's shoes.

However, the mere fact that the family has been temporarily reunited suggests that something sinister is afoot. That suspicion is immediately confirmed when Amicia and her father discover a mysterious blight while out walking in the woods. To make matters even worse, The Inquisition turns up, slaughters Amicia's father and the rest of his household and forces the young girl to take her brother on the road. The first destination is an alchemist who was helping Amicia's mother synthesize a cure, but when he dies the next best plan is to take his apprentice to an abandoned castle where there is a laboratory he can use to get started on finding a cure.

It quickly becomes apparent that Hugo's illness is nothing so mundane as measles of childhood leukemia, but rather a hereditary familial curse that allows him some degree of control over the swarms of plague rats overrunning the countryside. Indeed, it seems quite likely that Hugo is inadvertently the cause of the entire epidemic, as when you initially flee The Inquisition swarms of rats burst from the earth.

Since you are playing a frail teenage girl, there will be little head-to-head combat. Literally, every enemy in the game can one-shot you with ease. To be fair, provided they aren't wearing helmets then you can just as easily one-shot your opponents as well, as a stone to the skull is more than sufficient to drop an adult man. Though, I wish the game wasn't so quick to give you tools to deal with helmeted guards and guards in heavy armor (the former can be dispatched with an alchemical cocktail, and the latter with a command to one of your NPC comrades). After a while I simply gave up on stealth for anything aside from getting into a good position to annihilate any guards in my path, taking the classic “they can't alert me if they're dead” approach to stealth. This does present a bit of a problem, as the game is plainly meant to be a powerlessness simulator where your two helpless orphans are buffeted about a cruel, uncaring, and frequently hostile world. However, this tone cannot be maintained when a band of armed men is more of an annoyance than a genuine threat.

The other half of the gameplay is solving puzzles, usually involving moving rats from in your way to places out of your way by using light and fires. This is another break with reality, as in real life rats while likely to avoid light, are not terrified of it, and will happily brave bright lights if they see easy prey, which you most assuredly are (indeed it at times it seems like if one rat so much as brushes pass you you're doomed to a painfully slow death sequence). The rats themselves look suitably disgusting as they scamper about in a river of flesh, tails, and glowing eyes. At least until you focus in on an individual rat and see how they are all barely animated. The puzzles are, with few exceptions, quite simplistic and shouldn't pose much of an obstacle for any player, the few that do require you to use your brain will probably be spoiled by hints from either the player character or the NPCs before you've had enough time to think about it. Seriously, I'm starting to realize why serious puzzle games like The Witness [2016] are so often silent affairs.

The story premise of a reluctant lone protector escorting an important young charge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, owes an obvious debt to games like The Last of Us [2013]. However, it avoids The Last of Us' biggest weakness (its cliche setting) by placing the game's events in medieval France. The game does a laudable job of displaying different elements of the setting, as it takes you from cathedrals to corpse-strew battlefields, to small pastoral towns. Indeed, the sheer number and variety of locals makes me worry that its poor sequel will have few unique environs in France left to pick from. Just how historically accurate the Asobo's work here is beyond my ability to assess, though there are a few signs that at least some thought has gone into crafting a believable world. The mere fact that our protagonist will stop in a church to recite a prayer for her lost loved ones is in and of itself a rather promising sign as most modern developers have an annoying tendency to avoid religion in medieval settings altogether.

Of course, the game does have a rather questionable historical timeline. At one point the characters happens upon a fresco that depicts the plague of Justinian, and remark that the devastation there matches what they are seeing in contemporary France. However, I'm confused at how this timeline matches up, as this is specifically said to be the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, and by the 6th century AD when Justinian's plague was ravaging Europe, the Roman empire in the West was already long dead. The game compounds this issue by saying the ruin they are exploring was built in the 6th century AD by a Roman governor. Even if France could have had a Roman governor in the 6th century this would have been long after they were able to construct anything as sophisticated as this bathhouse. This whole sequence works better if you mentally remove any mention of Justinian's plague and replace it with earlier epidemics like The Antonine Plague or The Plague of Cyprian. I can't be the only turbo-autist obsessed with Ancient Rome who was annoyed by this discrepancy.

A Plague Tale does an excellent job of conveying the passage of time through small environmental details. The colors in Amicia's tunic gradually fade as the game progresses, while her breeches become increasingly dirty and frayed. The game takes place over several months, so the environments shift as well from a comparatively lush early fall to the bleakness of midwinter. When you revisit certain locations there is a sense of time passing as well. The first time you visit a town it may be being evacuated by the inquisition as infected people are being burnt inside their homes in an attempt to stem the tide of the plague. When you return it will be a depopulated wasteland ravaged by the entropy of disuse and side effects from the widespread fires. This attention to the passage of time is most effective when, late in the game, you return to the de Rune household you fled from in the first level. It is an effective environmental shorthand for emphasizing the long and traumatic journey that Amicia and Hugo have gone on and it allows the developers to drop some tantalizing story hints as well, by having Hugo's bedroom be completely untouched by the rats that infest the rest of the house.

I appreciate that the game gives us the option to play it in French with English subtitles, a feature I wish was mandatory for all foreign imports, as the original actors are invariably better than the English dubbers. Moreover, it helps a great deal with immersion as there is nothing more distracting than a 14th-century French noble with a California accent. However, I do have one small quibble about this. In the sequence where Amicia is captured by English soldiers, they are speaking French as well, since there is a perfectly usable English language track I would appreciate it if that was swapped in here.