The Protracted Pacing of ‘A Plague Tale: Requiem’
When I first played 2019’s A Plague Tale: Innocence, I think I was blown away more than most people. A harrowing tale of tarnished youth, having one’s childhood mercilessly ripped away by fortune and circumstance, I was emotionally moved by the entire experience start to finish. In fact, I do not believe there is a single wasted scene in Innocence, which is why I wrote about how the game has practically perfect pacing throughout, respecting its players’ time. Simply put, A Plague Tale: Innocence is basically what The Last of Us would be if it was a good video game.
Because of my Innocence article, I have been rewarded by friends and community members giving the game a chance when they might not have otherwise. That reward has admittedly yielded people who did not find the game as compelling or well-paced as I did, but a handful of people have agreed with my high praise of Innocence. Often citing the relationship between Amicia and Hugo, the game’s lead characters, or sometimes the stealth puzzle combat mechanics that keep each level feeling tense, basically anyone who has finished the game agrees that there is some interesting design here. And, if nothing else, I think all players will agree that Innocence sure knows how to render some rats.
I accept that not everyone will click with A Plague Tale: Innocence, but the objections to and imperfections present in the game haven’t shaken my glowing opinion whatsoever. Thus, as the fall season of 2022 rolled around, the sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem had me quaking with excitement. Despite the unquestionable juggernaut of Elden Ring, and the reality destabilizing Immortality, I knew with a rock-solid certainty that Requiem would be my favorite game of the year. It was the third time since starting my career that I have taken time off work for the release day of a video game, because I knew that when October 17th arrived, my mind would not be able to focus on anything else.
I played A Plague Tale: Requiem the way I play any game that I am frothing for: holed up in my bedroom with the curtains drawn, snacks stacked up, cats nearby, comfy clothes adorned – full zen mode. I didn’t step outside of my house once on release day, and it was glorious. But by nightfall, I found myself running out of steam with Requiem, getting stuck in a few stealth areas that felt a little too drawn out to remain compelling. And by that evening, Requiem slipped away from my lofty hopes of being my favorite 2022 game.
Protracted Pacing
My first fall-from-grace moment with Requiem was due to needlessly stretched out stealth sections, which were frustrating because they involved pass or fail concatenations that required vast chunks of time patiently sneaking around without story payoff. Though the gameplay of Innocence is certainly refined in parts by Requiem, I found that the game relied too much on stealth and therefore created a paradoxical situation where I lost the feeling of tension within these segments even though I was repeatedly dying in key sections. Dialogue repeats, guards reset, and these sections just do not feel respectful of the player’s time, even on a forgiving difficulty level. In these moments, I simply wanted to move on, but I could not because I had ended up cornered by rats, pacing guards, and a lack of light sources, infinitely respawning until it felt that brute force was my only choice – save for a reset. And reset, I did – many times.
That being said, A Plague Tale: Requiem starts incredibly strong, showcasing the ways in which Requiem is an upgrade and expansion of the concepts explored within Innocence. Immediately, you will notice how character models feel that much more polished, how level design is much broader, and vistas are more common and curated. You wander through peaceful sections, including a beautiful market that feels bursting with merchants and buyers, familiarizing yourself with what looks like the de Rune’s first stable home since the initial chapter of Innocence. Some of these chapters are lengthy, and by the time that the action takes over, an entire city is razed to the ground before your eyes by a veritable sea of rats. All of this is a quantitative upgrade from Innocence, but like the de Rune’s safety, it doesn’t last long.
Though Requiem is bigger, that does not always mean better. Sometimes a scene lasts too long, or an area stretches too far; other times, there are one too many waves of enemies or a puzzle that feels more filler than additive. Whereas Innocence used every scene to convey something new about the world – the fearsomeness of the rats, the inhumanity of the enemy soldiers, the suffering of being ripped away from one’s family, the sacrifices of growing up – Requiem often feels like these pieces are present to pad the runtime and merely make this experience feel more “AAA.”
By and large, I don’t think that these shifts towards a “AAA” experience are successful design choices in Requiem. In fact, I think they harm the experience, making it sometimes feel like entirely different teams have worked on the level design and the cutscenes, which is antithetical to what made Innocence so compelling. The briskness, the constant establishment and then sacrifice of characters, all of that feels missing until somewhere midway through the game when a character called Arnaud is introduced. The worst offense is that Requiem gives way to a trend that I’ve written about before: being insecure with brevity, stretching itself for too long.
Violent Urges
Amicia de Rune has a dehumanization problem. It is at once apparent in Requiem that Amicia is dealing with some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder – something entirely understandable given her plight, not only protecting Hugo, her little brother, but coping with the incessant loss of allies and protectors who have sacrificed themselves along the de Rune’s journey. Though I can understand and empathize with those internalized aggressive responses, Innocence’s depiction of Amicia slowly descending into the role of a killer – not just a protector – is part of the success of her character arc. Seeing the results of that character arc play out in the immediate chapters of Requiem is harrowing, and I not only feel bad for Amicia, but I simultaneously want her to stop going down this path. Amicia, however, refuses.
When presented with a threatening group of enemies tracking her and Hugo down, Amicia has a breaking point where she loses her grip on reality due to a murderous rage. Trapped in a wooden building, admitting waves of soldiers from a balcony above and doors below, Amicia stays behind unnecessarily while her compatriots have already escaped. While they are begging her to abandon her bloodthirsty psychotic break, Amicia’s voice actress truly rips out the final shreds of soul and conscience that her character clung to at the end of Innocence. Amicia’s actions here are no longer noble, no longer innocent; she is killing for enjoyment, for pleasure, for sadistic revenge, not the protective, defensive, no-way-out violence she displayed in the previous game. And in this scene, Amicia refuses to give into reason – which I think is the moment where I could not explain her actions in good conscience. She was acting villainous.
Amicia develops into an overprotective guardian of Hugo, cutting off her mother and good friend Lucas, marooning herself with Hugo as they forcibly drift away downstream. She distrusts every new person she meets and threatens half of them to boot. She becomes a stubborn, aggressive, unlikeable character for a solid portion of this story – no fault of the voice acting or facial performances – until her confidence is forcibly torn away. Some part of me thinks that Amicia’s fall from grace into madness is part of her necessary journey.
But this overprotective defensiveness and hostility wears thin quite quickly when charismatic scene-stealers like Arnaud or Sophia join alongside the de Runes. She’s just miserable to be around. Admittedly, these are shady characters who have committed plenty of criminal actions in their own right, but even Hugo with his unique powers of evoking empathy and trust from Amicia cannot penetrate her veil of darkness and resentment. Begrudgingly, by the end, Amicia comes to appreciate these characters, which does feel rewarding; but slogging through her initial hesitations which often have no logical reasoning behind them is frustrating to experience as a player who knows that Amicia and Hugo deeply need help. Like a Naughty Dog game, the conflict only serves to derail the plot down another detour.
A Strong Ending
Thankfully, by the end of Requiem, the game regains some of the footing that it lost early on. I picked up the game again after a few months away from it, finishing the remainder of the game in a single session on my Steam Deck. These final four chapters feel breakneck compared to the pacing of the mid-game, hence that one-sitting finale. In that brief, brisk series of chapters, tragedy strikes: we lose some important characters, Amicia receives a brutal injury, and Hugo once again seems to have become consumed by the Macula – a somewhat magical curse that ties his life to that of the plague of rats swarming over the world. Each event is a massive upheaval for these characters instead of the infinite chain of puzzles and stealth sections from before, and the story once again regains ground, emerging as the gripping narrative I was hoping for in the first place.
Requiem’s finale, in particular, is hauntingly beautiful to behold, and feels like a lasting payoff to these characters that, despite their annoyances, I do genuinely love to spend time with. I always gauge the degree to which games affect me based on whether they can make me cry, and I must admit that, despite my frustrations outlined above, Requiem had me in tatters by the credits roll. Without explicitly spoiling the nuances of Requiem’s ending, suffice it to say that this sequel earns its tragic subtitle.
Overall Thoughts on Requiem
A Plague Tale: Requiem is one of the weirder games to speak about from recent memory because it objectively is an upgrade in the technical sense – there’s more to the package than Innocence. But as preferences and opinions change over time, I have come to appreciate it when games follow the classic creative writing advice of “killing your darlings.” Requiem cannot bear to cut anything off its bloated runtime, and the story feels less cohesive for it. No single part of this game is broken in a way that strikes me as objectively bad, there’s just a glaring issue with this game’s unblemished cutting room floor. You could clearly eliminate at least one-fourth from this game, and Requiem would be stronger for it.
Alas, A Plague Tale: Requiem did not make my top five favorite games of 2022, but it is still a game I would recommend. Especially if you want to see your PC hardware pushed a little more than most games, seeing the tens of thousands of rats animated at once is just a completely unique experience that puts some scenes from Innocence to the test for technical prowess. Olivier Derriviere’s score is somber and soaring in equal measure, amounting to one of the stronger soundtracks from that year. And the character performances are second-to-none, again evoking the quality of critical darlings like The Last of Us but with a fraction of the team and budget.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is worth your time if you were a fan of the original, but I would not expect most people to finish it. More importantly, expect a greater quantity of content here – for better or for worse – but fewer gripping moments. If you can stomach a few too many stealth and puzzle sections, a few extra detours along the de Rune’s journey, I believe the bravery of Requiem’s ending will stick with you for a long time.
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