A Plague Tale: Innocence does indeed look like that one game with the brilliant rats
Oh rats!
If you like seeing swarms of rats burst out of pulsating corpses and devour men alive, boy howdy do I have the video for you. Sixteen minutes of sneaking, puzzling, and murdering-by-rat from A Plague Tale: Innocence are yours to watch in a gameplay video creeping out of Gamescom today. Y'know, that's the stealth puzzler about kids travelling across 14th Century France through war and the Black Death, the game our former Adam (RPS in peace) said "will almost certainly be That One Game With The Brilliant Rats". They are indeed brilliant rats, flowing like a river made of teeth. Come see!
(If that looks familiar, you might've seen bits of it with blokes talking over the top during E3 in June.)
As is made quite clear, A Plague Tale is a game about ravenous rats. They would like to eat you and your little friends, but they're afraid of light because reasons so you're safe in the light. There is not always light. And sometimes there are people in the light. Which means you need to sneak and solve puzzles to find desirable quantities and combinations of light, rats, and bad men. It does look disappointing linear and simplistic in this video, with puzzles that aren't puzzles as much as solutions waiting for us to set them in motion, but that's perhaps not a surprise.
Do remember the purpose of Gamescom gameplay demos: to present the pieces of the game and the ways they can interact so clearly that it can be understand even by a hungover games writer who hasn't yet realised they have currywurst in their ears and a blackletter forehead tattoo of the name ????????. Fingers crossed the full game gets trickier and more creative, though obviously it's not a pure puzzler so a fair part of satisfaction is to come from the kiddywinkles' journey.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is slated to launch some time in 2019. It's developed by Asobo, the French studio behind open-world racer Fuel, and published by Focus Home Interactive.
Ah go on, have a song.
