A Plague Tale: Requiem review – an essential Game Pass encore, in sickness and in health

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During the Dutch revolt from 1566 to 1648, there was a cruel general of the Geuzen named Diederik Sonoy that supposedly employed rats as a method of torture on captured troops. He’d take a starving rat, a pottery bowl, and embers of charcoal from a nearby fire and show them to the accused. The rat – intentionally starved and kept separate from other creatures – would be placed on the naked body of a prisoner. The bowl would be placed over the rat, and the charcoals added on top. The rat would gnaw into the very bowels of the victim, as it tried desperately to escape. More often than not, the rat and the prisoner would die. The rat’s destruction in an attempt at self-preservation was all for nothing.

That’s what A Plague Tale: Requiem feels like; your protagonist duo, Amicia and Hugo, are the rats. They rip an almost-unbelievable path of destruction through 14th Century France as they run, panicked, from the death and disease that they cannot shake. They wreak havoc on the fragile body of a country torn apart by war, pestilence, famine, and death. Cruelty and inhumanity pushes them forward as the world falls apart behind them, and in trying to be kind they do some of the most horrific damage you’re liable to see in a video game this year.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is not for the faint-hearted – and not just because of the 300,000 rats the developers can summon on-screen at once. The central story is a grim reflection of a human race that is, inherently, cruel. It’s a story about how even the brightest and most caring of us can be pushed to our limits and become unhinged; violent and disaffected and barbaric. It’s a game that is aware of what it makes you do – how it makes you kill, even if you don’t want to – and pulls on that guilt to make you, and your characters, suffer. In A Plague Tale: Requiem, you are the rat being forced through the body of a France that knows nothing but sorrow, and you will find you just can’t stop eating – no matter how much it hurts you.

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