A Plague Tale: Requiem, the tried-and-true Asobo game

To stand out in a competitive environment like video games, it is practically necessary to have at least one distinct advantage as a development team. that of Asobo It is undoubtedly a terrible competence for everything related to the technical sector. The first A Plague Tale game, after all, was certainly not a mechanically revolutionary game, but it did manage to stand out due to its look markedly superior to what would normally be expected from a production with limited resources behind it and a great combination of technical direction and general solidity. Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was entrusted to the Software House soon after, did nothing but underscore the amazing skills of this group of French graphic developers (as well as enhance their apparent ability to complete challenging projects in times far from scriptural). .

Following the success of Innocence, however, Asobo Studio is now grappling with an almost inevitable sequel called A Plague Tale: Requiem, and given the syllabus, fan expectations are higher than ever. We can Try A Plague Tale: Requiem For about an hour thanks to the Tribeca Festival and today, after bathing in a sea of ​​rats more times than we would have liked, we’re ready to tell you our first impressions.

rat of us

there Date Mass will resume immediately after the conclusion of the first chapter. We don’t give you spoilers at the end: just know that brothers Amecia and Hugo are still at the center of events and that despite escaping to the warm lands of the South, the two poor boys have been unable to escape the curse that haunts the younger brother. However, we haven’t been able to play this sequel’s campaign right from the start since the Chapter 3 demo started; Then we find ourselves controlling a young Amecia with another partner named Lucas (already featured in the previous game).

The goal of the level playable on the simple card was: to get some soothing herbs to placate poor Hugo’s bad crunch, due to some chemical treatments. However, things got complicated almost immediately when after leaving the initial ‘quiet’ zone we found ourselves struggling with the usual inescapable sea ​​of ​​rats And with a group of guards keen to eliminate any witnesses nearby.

Yes, in short, the foundations of the Requiem Mass appear to be the same as those that preceded it, but given Hugo’s state after the first adventure and landslides in the narrative, we expect some significant structural changes in later chapters.

In general, what we tested was still a file Mixed between a stealth game and a puzzle game, albeit with some modifications. In fact, the game now looks a little more brutal than it did in the past, due to a greater number of methods, and he faced rats and sentinels with more cunning so that they would not be killed in a few seconds. Amicia already has many tools at its disposal, but either by the fact that it was thrown right into the action, or due to the increasing complexity of situations, we assure you that you have been broken many times by marginal errors. Requiem in short seemed to want to heighten the tension of having to contend with a sensitive sea of ​​man-eating rodents, as if this was really nothing more than a plausible reason to be on the edge of the skin.

Moral choices or simple survival?

To give you an example, the editing Again centralized and Amecia in the tested class could make rock-salt and sulfur shots or grenades, capable of extinguishing or igniting fires at will. Besides the simple ability to throw rocks with your slingshot, this ammo is the most natural way to survive in any situation: the guards carrying the torch can be eliminated simply by putting out the flames, and whole groups of enemies become mice food with a grenade in position Good ; However, classic stones are not offended, because soldiers are often protected by steel helmets, and therefore have to be disposed of in more creative ways.

For her part, the hero can now also Push the guards In danger if he catches them by surprise or stabs them if he has blades available, but the soldiers aren’t the most terrible threat (despite their sometimes nefarious locations) but the rats themselves. Navigating the maps is actually quite complicated, there are no indicators at all, and the torches last a few seconds, so you can’t hope for progress if you don’t collect all the possible resources scattered around the buildings and don’t use the fires properly.

What about the multiple options we talked about earlier? Well, it is possible to easily overcome even the most intricate stages by committing a massacre, but there always seems to be an opportunity to peacefully overcome unseen areas; Doing so makes everything extraordinarily more complicated. However, it is not clear at the moment whether the choice of peaceful method leads to some difference in the narrative: Amecia comments and verbally justifies her actions when she eliminates very few soldiers, and at a certain point we did not understand how to do it. Perhaps memorizing a character would have been completeable in a more positive way (unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to test it), so we suspect there are more obvious crossroads this time around and that the heroine’s behavior might lead to alternate developments in the story.

Generally? Despite our foolishness in knowing where to go, we enjoyed the experience. Is there any shortage ofArtificial intelligence of the enemy Placing mice on certain maps seems extremely difficult, yet Requiem does indeed seem a reasonable development of the first chapter from what has been tested.

However, once again, the most gigantic steps forward can be seen in Technical sector. True, there are some woody and unnatural animations before certain stages of scripting, but the overall visual effect is impressive. The maps are frighteningly detailed, the atmospheric effects are really realistic (a downpour in the early stages left us speechless, thanks to the almost indistinguishable rain and the reaction of puddles to water droplets), and even the animations are significantly improved. Asobo’s new kid looks amazing, and if the gameplay really changes and grows predictably throughout the campaign, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a much higher pearl on your hands than the already valid innocence.