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A Plague Tale: Innocence scurrying out May 14th

Oh rats!

The historical horrors of Black Death 'em up A Plague Tale: Innocence will swarm onto PC on May 14th, publishers Focus Home Interactive announced today. That One Game With The Brilliant Rats, as our former Adam (RPS in peace) nicknamed it, is a stealth-o-story about kiddywinkles creeping across medieval France while evading bad humans and worse rats. Oh, the rats! Those ravenous rats. Scurrying, burrowing into flesh, devouring. They flow like a terrible torrent of teeth and I'll certainly pay good money to see that myself.

So there these children are, bang smack in the 14th century, being chased by the Inquisition while the Black Death sweeps across France. That's human baddies and rodentine baddies. Humans are fairly easy to deal with using stealth to dodge 'em and quiet attacks like conking 'em with a catapult - or by sending rats after them. The rats are too numerous to be defeated, only kept at bay. They're afraid of light so fires and torches will keep them at bay, because reasons.

I believe we'll need to juggle these threats - fire to keep rats at bay, but also notfire to avoid alerting humans. And if we can knock out a baddie's lamp with our handy sling so rats go for him, well, good for us. All of which builds into a mix of stealth, light puzzling, story, and violence. As I understand it, anyway.

You can see how it looked in June 2018 in this gameplay video.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is made by Asobo Studio, the French folks behind open-world racer Fuel. Quite a change of pace. Here's some of them gabbing about the game in a new video dev diary doodad:

Cover image for YouTube video

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A Plague Tale: Innocence

PS4, Xbox One, PC

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About the Author
Alice O'Connor avatar

Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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