The Plague is a brand new action-adventure game developed by Asobo Studio and published by Focus Home Interactive for consoles and PC!
The game will be unveiled at the beginning of February to international video game press at What's Next de Focus, the Paris event showcasing games currently in production at Focus.
The Plague is currently finishing pre-production, and will be presented through a first version of the game at What's Next de Focus on February 1st and 2nd in Paris.
It’s a strange thing to be known for, but A Plague Tale: Innocence [official site] will almost certainly be That One Game With The Brilliant Rats. As soon as footage starts to spread around the internet, it’s the rats that people will settle on because they are the entire point of the exercise. With all apologies to the two kids who are the actual protagonists, sneaking through a plague-ridden medieval French city and avoiding both inquisitors and rats, it’s the swarms that steal the show. Both as a game mechanic and a technical feat, the rats are king. It makes Dishonored look like a petting zoo.
Watching a slice of Plague Tale, played by a developer, reminded me of seeing the Mardi Gras crowds in Hitman Blood Money for the first time. Games often avoid depicting large groups of moving characters, preferring to treat crowds as a single entity rather than a larger entity made up of many smaller but discrete elements. I loved that in that Murder of Crows level, a gunshot would cause groups of people to separate, splitting into their own unique patterns of panic and escape.
A Plague Tale, in its current form, puts its big idea right on the menu screen. A swarm of rats, each one moving dynamically, are feasting on a corpse. You can see them squirming up and around one another, nibbling and biting and fighting for space. And then, when you press start, a carriage rattles past in the street outside the building where the body is lying and its lantern sends a pool of light splashing through the window. The rats peel away from the light, scurrying and scratching, and then slowly inch their way back to the feast once it has passed.
It’s grotesquely gorgeous and explains the game’s central conceit extremely well. You play as two children, though there’s no evidence of a smart Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons style control system at this point. It looks like you’ll always, or mostly, be in control of Amicia, the older of the two, or whether you’ll also control tiny little Hugo who is about six years old. Amicia is either pre-teen or barely into her teens, but she seems capable enough, at least in the brains department, outsmarting the chaps who are hunting her and her brother. It’s a stealth game, based almost entirely around light rather than sound.
Rats don’t like the light, so the darkness is often a sea of teeth and eyes. Portable light sources keep them at bay, but are hard to come by, so you’ll need to stick to what light there is in the environments, while destroying the lanterns and torches that the inquisitors carry. When you do, they’re soon covered in rats, screaming and devoured. Grim.
The small chunk of the game I saw might not actually be in the game at all, with release possibly a year and a half away or more, but as a technical demonstration it was impressive. At one point, rats pour through a church’s windows like streams of oil, flooding the floor and lapping against the flicker of torchlight that protects the protagonists. They’re fluid, like a particle system with teeth and claws, and the way that they writhe and surge adds an element of horror to what might be fairly conventional environmental light-based puzzles.
It’s too early to know whether the game will live up to its rats, but I do like seeing a mechanic directly tied to exciting tech. The historical setting has clear elements of fantasy, not least in the rats themselves, but will be mostly grounded in reality, and if the environments are depicted half as well as their inhabitants, it’ll be a beautiful game if nothing else.
Side note: developers Asobo worked on a game based on the Pixar film Ratatouille and that amuses me.
@Prudi and Civ01: I don't know if it's the same footage as the one that was originally posted, but some Italian sites have gameplay bits (from 0:25 onwards). Seems..pretty interesting, Ratblade: Amicia's Odyssey
(Roughly translated - in a nutshell)
- Fairly linear structure, with occasional slightly larger areas every now and then;
- Sticks, torches and resources are limited and must be preserved;
- The little brother develops special abilities that can help with mini-puzzles and keep the rats away;
- The human enemies can either be tricked through stealth or knocked down with tools/throwable objects;
- Leaving the kid alone for too long can lead him to having anxiety attacks (+ screaming which attracts enemies);
- It looks good, but the facial animations need a bit of work (also, the release date is still unknown at the moment).
A Plague Tale: Innocence, the upcoming adventure game developed by Asobo Studio for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, unleashes its hordes of rats in the E3 Trailer!
Join siblings Amicia and young Hugo, as they struggle through the heart of the brutal and ruthless world of 12th century France. The rats swarm in uninterrupted waves throughout the Kingdom of France. In the disease-devastated villages, countryside and battlefields, they devour everything in their path, men and animals alike, to satisfy the endless hunger of their ever-increasing numbers. The faint glow of the flame Amicia holds appears to be the only thing that repels this uncontrollable and voracious mass's relentless advance...
A Plague Tale: Innocence tells a grim and emotional story, sending us on journey through medieval France, with gameplay blending adventure, action and stealth, supported by a compelling, moving story. Follow Amicia and her little brother Hugo, trying to survive a harsh, brutal world plagued by the Black Death. On the run from the Inquisition, and surrounded by unnatural swarms of rats that appeared with the Black Death, Amicia and Hugo embark on a rocky journey that will not leave them unscathed.
A Plague Tale: Innocence arrives on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in 2019. Hands off presentations and interviews are available at E3 2018.
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