A Plague Tale: Innocence
With Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy dropping this summer, this felt like the right time to finally play the original and figure out whether this series earns its sequels. I never took it seriously. Cheap Game Pass fodder, short runtime, small-scale double-A stuff, or so I assumed. Dead wrong. These games are gas.
Quick context: Asobo shipped A Plague Tale: Innocence in 2019, and it sold over a million copies by summer 2020. A direct sequel, Requiem, followed in 2022. Now, in 2026, Resonance arrives as a prequel set fifteen years before Requiem, with a Requiem side character stepping into the lead. I have not played Requiem or Resonance yet. This is Innocence on its own.
November 1348, France, mid-Hundred Years’ War. Amicia de Rune is fifteen, a noble’s daughter, out hunting with her father when something in the woods eats the family dog. Things escalate fast, and soon Amicia is on the run, hunting for shelter and medical help for her younger brother Hugo, dodging the Inquisition and vicious plague rats that swarm after dark. I will not say more than that. This is a story worth going in blind for.
It plays as a stealth-puzzle walking sim. You control Amicia and Hugo, constantly running, ducking, and dodging through a savage dark-fantasy world that does not flinch from its own brutality: bodies everywhere, rats tearing people apart, body horror, an Inquisition that butchers without hesitation. Not scary exactly, but extremely tense, immersive enough that good headphones matter, partly for that tension and partly because the score is outstanding. Strings-driven, built to keep you feeling like danger is always one step away, because it is. Nothing about this game is Halloween-themed on paper, and it still plays like a Halloween game. September or October is the right season for it.
Most of the runtime has you shepherding Hugo, a sick five-year-old prone to debilitating headaches. You hold his hand through levels and carry him when he flares up. My only real gripe is that he can grate a little in spots, understandable given what he is written to be, and he grows on you the same way every character here does. Hard to hold it against a five-year-old for acting like one.
This is also a cinematic game, the kind people point to when they complain that God of War or Spider-Man or “PlayStation exclusives” in general are just interactive movies. This is that style done right. You are here for a specific story with strong acting, strong voice work, and a great score, with stakes that keep tension running the whole way while you scavenge for supplies. Near the end, a specific character dies, and plenty of characters do, good and bad alike, so that alone is not the spoiler. What got me was that I actually felt it. I saw it coming and still felt it, because the game gives you enough time with these people to care when something happens to them. Not many games tell stories like this anymore, and it is a shame this one never broke through the noise the way it deserved to.
Compare that to God of War Ragnarök: chasing the weight of the original trilogy, building out Norse mythology, tying into a wider universe, running a father-son arc, setting up future games, stacking challenge modes, functioning as a Kratos therapy session, and trying to look spectacular doing all of it at once. That is a lot of jobs for one game. I do not think the usual complaint about cinematic games, that it is a gameplay problem, is actually the problem. I think it is the opposite: these games try to do too much and overcomplicate themselves. Doubling down on one strength beats chasing every strength at once.
Plague Tale is not simple, but it commits fully to immersive tension instead of complex combat systems: stealth puzzles and quick ammo-swapping with the slingshot. Not saying Ragnarök should have been built differently. Just that there is a right way to do the cinematic game, and this is a clean example of it.
It retails for $39.99 and goes on sale often. Grab it discounted, or play it now if you already have Game Pass. This is not a gritty action game chasing mechanical depth. It is a genuine piece of art: strong characters, a beautiful score, a story I loved. 9 out of 10. Highly recommend.
