Some of the most brilliant games come from odd ideas. What if you took something that was traditionally background in a game and brought it to the forefront" That’s exactly what A Plague Tale: Innocence is doing, swarming the screen with carnivorous plague-ridden rats, where the only safe place is in the light. To top off the tale, you don’t play as some hunky hero or sexy vixen. Players take on the role of Amicia, a teenager in France helping her sick little brother cross a torn landscape full of those bloodthirsty rats.
Immediately noticeable is the rat tech. The horde swarms , scampering around and over each other, a single hive-mind entity that maintains the individuality of every one of its members. While the studio could have simply and easily made some kind of looping rat-mass texture that seethes and teems across every surface, they instead landed on this much more intense and admittedly almost accidental swarm. The developers have said that up to 5,000 individual rats can be in any given scene. Amicia can move through them by manipulating fire and objects in the environment. As much as the rats are a danger and a barrier, they can also provide puzzle solutions, like devouring guards so that you can move around them without being seen. It’s kind of hard for a guard to spot and catch you when they’re rat food. There’s something viscerally satisfying about slinging a rock into a guard’s lantern and hearing his screams as the l...