Sometimes a family can be a teenage girl, her brother, a handful of orphans, and thousands upon thousands of horrifying, supernaturally empowered, disease ridden rats — A Plague Tale
(I’m putting the sales pitch a little early here because I’ve just been suspended from Twitter again and I’m really not in a good place in terms of finance or my own family situation, so it’s more important than usual that you please share my work, and, if you can, support me, any way you can. This one might be a little rough because I didn’t really edit it much! I’m kind of freaking out right now, though you’d think this kind of thing would be old hat for me.)
The year is 1348 and France is not doing so well. A war wages across the country as the English Plantagenet invades France, opposed by the French House of Valois over who has rightful claim to the throne of western Europe’s largest kingdom. More unsettlingly, there are rumours of illness going around, spread by bites in the night that leave the victims sick and ill, covered in plague boils. Young Amicia de Rune, a noble girl with dreams of being a knight, finds her peaceful life thrust into chaos as her loyal dog is killed by an unseen force and before her family’s estate can mount some kind of resistance, they’re attacked by the implacable and terrifying Lord Nicholas, right hand and hound of the Inquisition.
Fleeing from the Inquisition’s hunters, who have come for Amicia’s younger brother Hugo and the mysterious and occult power within his blood, the de Rune children are orphaned and made outcasts, hiding from both the Inquisition and the increasing unnatural horror of the rat plague. Amicia and Hugo come to find friendship and aid with other orphans, and their distant relationship grows as they learn to love each other.
![A Plague Tale — Innocence [logo]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:3840/format:webp/1*s1X1L4wQ9KmLlkvGrqLxRQ.png)
This is A Plague Tale: Innocence, from France’s own Asobo Studios and published by Focus Home Interactive, who also published Vampyr, the last game I took a look at.
I did not fully understand just what A Plague Tale was when I first loaded up the demo. I knew there were rats, I knew that it took place during the Hundred Years War. I knew that it was a tale about the plague, and, presumably, innocents. Then while out walking through the woods with her father, and learning the sling and stealth mechanics by hunting a boar, Amicia stumbles into a horrible spooky ass part of the forest and her dog Lion is dragged down into the depths and devoured by something unnatural. That was my first tip off that maybe I was not about to play a historical fiction stealth game.
There were more hints that something sinister was going on as I learned about Amicia’s little brother, Hugo, and her mother, Beatrice. Amicia barely knows her mother and brother, despite living in the same country manor in Aquitaine. Hugo suffers from some mysterious maladie, and throughout his life Beatrice has been brewing potions and doing research to cure him, or at least to halt the spread of the disease. When the Inquisition turns up and begins to slaughter everyone, demanding to know where Hugo is, it becomes clear that Beatrice’s alchemy has placed the de Rune family on the wrong side of the Church.
As Amicia and Hugo escape from their ancestral home, the ground quakes and the knights in the forest chasing the pair are swallowed up by something sinister and unearthly. The demo ended here, and the game’s trailer showed me all sorts of things at odds with the gamified historical fiction I’d been expecting for whatever reason. It also had me excited enough that I wanted to play the game all the way through, especially once it was on Game Pass.
Family
According to the developers, the main theme of Plague Tale is “family”. At the heart of the game is the relationship between the siblings Amicia and Hugo de Rune. Despite being related, the two of them are strangers to each other at first, owing to the nature of Hugo’s disease, and the way that he was kept from the world. Because of this, as well as Hugo’s naivete, Amicia struggles with her brother, but never stops caring for him. The way the two interact feels natural, which is probably helped by the fact that the two characters’ actors, Charlotte McBurney and Logan Hannan, actually had input in writing the dialogue, making them feel like actual children.
Amicia spends much of the game conflicted by the responsibilities of caring for her new responsibility, and on more than one occasion she lashes out at Hugo in frustration. It feels real, and painful. When Amicia lashes out at her younger brother for making noise when he really needs to be quiet, it’s understandable and realistic. Many people who have siblings, cousins, or close family friends of the same age can likely understand that kind of frustration. Hugo’s response to run away — or later to simply sulk — is childish and petulant, but it’s also something you can sympathize with. Just as painful are moments when Amicia does something horrible that she knows will scare — and scar — Hugo and begs him to look away. Generally when she’s about to do a murder, whether indirectly by rats or directly by her slingshot. Despite the difficulty of dealing with him, its clear that Amicia cares for Hugo, and its shown nowhere clearer than in the animations.
The first time that Amicia climbs through a window, as she, her mother, and he are creeping through their estate as the Inquisition attacks it looking for Hugo, Beatrice chastizes her for leaving Hugo to clamber over on his own, reminding Amicia that he needs help. Throughout the rest of the game whenever you come to a ledge, she carefully lifts him over first. She always climbs down ladders first and waits for him to descend, even when he’s mad at her. Amicia cares for all the other characters and allies, but with none of them does she fear for their safety the way that she does for Hugo. At every point when Hugo is with her, Amicia holds out her hand for him. When she has him wait and calls him back to her, she stretches out her hand in anticipation of him. During cutscenes where Hugo has passed out or fallen asleep, she holds him close, stroking his cheek or hair. When someone says something threatening, she puts a hand to Hugo’s chest and pushes him back behind her. As the developers said in a commentary, they wanted players to feel that this was someone who would die without their help.
Hugo cares for Amicia as well, but due to his naivete he doesn’t quite get the danger that they’re in, and it frustrates her. He barely knows her at first, and doesn’t really respect her authority. She is, after all, practically a stranger. When his childishness and innocent belief that he can simply turn himself over to the Inquisition causes him to be tortured and become their pawn, his anger towards her even leads him to become the Inquisition’s weapon, and it only takes a great effort of affection to bring him back. Still, throughout the game, Hugo clings to her whenever they’ve been apart, even if he was mad at her, and huddles in tight to her when the pair are going through a swarm of rats. He loves her as well underneath a youthful petulance and ignorance.
Hugo’s other big familial relationship is with their mother Beatrice, who has been his constant companion until the day that all of this started. Beatrice is a woman who has moved heaven and earth for her son. She delved deep into alchemy and the legacy of Hugo’s bloodline to find a cure, or to halt the process so that he could become better prepared. She even turned to forbidden and heretical texts to find a way to save Hugo. As a result of her love, she also kept him locked away from the rest of the world, where he could never know any suffering other than the headaches and pain that his condition brought on. Because of Beatrice, Amicia and Hugo grew up apart, despite living in the same estate.
When Hugo finds out that his mother is still alive he tried to run away while Amicia is sleeping to go and find her. He turns himself over to the Inquisition, and in the end he becomes their pawn all because he wanted to see his mummy again. It’s with her help that he can finally deal with the painful headaches that he’s been experiencing, and he can communicate with the rats that have been whispering in his head. This of course is the ability that the villains wanted all along, and once he’s gained that ability the Grand Inquisitor forces him to use it to kill a dozen or so guards or let his mother die. Hugo steps up for Beatrice, and in the end he pushes himself too hard for her, until he passes out and the Inquisition can simply recapture them.
Our main heroes aren’t the only ones who have strong family ties. Following Beatrice’s instructions before they were separated from her, the siblings track down Laurentius, an alchemist and doctor who was helping Beatrice treat Hugo’s Macula. Laurentius himself doesn’t survive the swarms of rats that overtake his home, but the pair still gain the aid of Lucas, the young assistant of Laurentius. Its unclear what his relationship to Laurentius is, though he clearly cared for the old man, despite living in his secret heretical basement laboratory. Lucas is a brilliant young alchemist, and eager to help the de Runes.
In many ways, Lucas becomes a part of the family for Hugo and Amicia. While his familial circumstances are uncertain and barely touched upon, the other orphans who come to live in the Chateau d’Ombrage have more to them. Particularly the pair of thief siblings, Arthur and Melie.
First introduced by getting Amicia and Hugo captured to save themselves, Arthur and Melie return to free the other brother and sister from the English invaders, having been told by Lucas that they were still rich and that there would be a reward. The two of them are scavengers, and have lived a tough life. Unlike the other orphans, Arthur and Melie were not loved by their parents. Their father was abusive, and they up and left, and have been living on their own ever since, doing what they can to survive. When the player comes across them, they’re looting from the dead just outside of a battlefield, and being interrogated and threatened by a soldier. They’re about as far as can be from the relatively pampered life of the nobility that Amicia and Hugo have lived.
The two of them also care for each other and are willing to go to great lengths to care for each other. When Arthur is captured by the Inquisition, Melie jumps at the chance to save him, without concern for her own life. Later on, when the two have returned to the Chateau d’Ombrage, they stay with the others for a while, but Arthur argues with Melie, afraid that the Inquisition will find them one day and that the walls of the castle won’t be enough to save them. In the end his fears turn out to be justified, and when Lord Nicholas slays Arthur, Melie is left distraught and angry, and she’s the first to want to go kill them all.
The last member of the Orphan Squad™ is the son of a blacksmith that Amicia rescues from the clutches of the Inquisition, and flees the Bastion with. His father built the massive wall that guards the secret basement of the library, where all the sacred and heretical books, like the mythical Sanguinis Itinera Amicia has come to find, are kept. The Inquisition murdered Roderic’s father, and want him to do what his dad wouldn’t and let them through the door. He hates the Inquisition for what they did, and he’s not shy about showing it. Late in the game, you can even come upon the ruins of his father’s shop, which the Inquisition have burned down.
Every character, except perhaps Lucas, who is something of a mystery despite being the first of all the side characters to join your group, is driven by a sense of family. Wanting to protect what family they have, or get revenge on the Inquisition for taking that family from them.
Over the course of the game, these orphans who all come to live at Chateau d’Ombrage also come to form their own family with each other. This time is woefully short, but after each of the game’s time skips there’s a sense of togetherness and comradery that seems to have developed in the intervening days and weeks. Characters fall asleep together, and spend time together. They want to talk with each other. Lucas seems to have developed a crush on Melie, and they’ve all come to know each others’ strengths. The last fight that Melie and Arthur have is about whether or not they should stay, with Melie believing that the Chateau is a good, and safe place. Unfortunately, Arthur isn’t actually off the mark.
There is, in a way, another aspect of family. “Blood” is often used as a poetic term for familial bonds, so if you’ll forgive me for some creative reading here, Grand Inquisitor Benevent Vitalis is also a part of Hugo’s family. Late in the game, after Hugo has turned himself in to the Inquisition in the hopes of seeing his mother again, Vitalis injects himself with Hugo’s blood, so that the two of them will be joined in the Macula and Vitalis will have all of Hugo’s powers when he crosses the Thresholds and learns to control the rats.
Whether the game is intentionally drawing parallels here or not, Vitalis himself says that he and Hugo are tied together now. After spending a month in captivity, being shaped and molded by Vitalis, Hugo, still angry at Amicia for lying to him, brings unholy chittering death to the Chateau d’Ombrage, overwhelming the anti-rat defenses that were mysteriously built into the castle several hundred years before this whole rat plague mess. He’s still innocent, though, and he walks through the castle’s underground with Lord Nicholas holding his hand like an older sibling. Right before Nicholas orders Hugo to kill all his friends.
What snaps Hugo out of his dark, murderous episode after weeks of whatever abuse Vitalis put him through is ultimately the love of his sister. Amicia charges through the swirling mass of chittering death and reaches out to her brother to show him affection and give him a hug.
Obviously, Lord Nicolas and the Grand Inquisitor aren’t actually Hugo’s family in any sense of the word, but that tie of blood makes the connection too much for me to overlook. When Hugo returns with Amicia, Lucas, and Melie to avenge Arthur and Roderic and save their mother, Vitalis taunts the boy, claiming that Hugo is a very gifted student, but he’s forgotten all that he knows. Despite wanting to kill Hugo and become the only Carrier, Vitalis does see himself as having some sort of blood connection with him. Its worth pointing out, at least. That chapter is even called “Blood Ties”.
Innocence
Possibly even stronger than the notion of family is the notion of innocence. It is, after all, the game’s subtitle. A Plague Tale really shines when it comes to the brutal things that these children have to do to survive, and the way that its affecting them.
Amicia wants to be a knight, and she’s clearly familiar enough with hunting that she knows animals need to die for you to eat them, but she’s never seen the death of a person up close. Not, that is, until she actually has to kill someone.
Brought on as the fallout of Amicia lashing out at Hugo for being an angry, petulant five year old who was just chased by people who wanted to burn him alive, Amicia is forced to use her newly repaired sling to kill a man threatening her with a sickle. As she winds up and throws the stone that kills him, she begs him to stop, and when he falls over dead, she exclaims in horror at what she’s done. Its a far cry from how games usually treat the first fight, which is usually the first time the characters have ever faced or caused death.
And then, moments later she hears Hugo crying out for her, his anger at her forgotten as he gets captured by a violent man who believes that they’re the cause of the plague. He actually isn’t far off, but these are our protagonists all the same, and infanticide is a bit of an extreme reaction under any circumstance. This man, its worth noting, is also driven mad by the loss of his own family. Grief over his son’s death has driven him to whip a mob up and start purging the village.
Conrad is the game’s first boss. He wields a big, threatening spiked club that looks like it was made with wood and nails he had lying around. His suit of armour is roughly made and held together by the same oversized rings that break when you hit them with your slingshot, the same rings that in previous puzzles held up seemingly empty crates that you needed to knock down and push into place. The game’s language tells you what you have to do, and as you keep doing it, knocking off every piece of his ramshackle armour and running away from his giant mallet, Conrad chides and taunts you. As more of the fragile rings snap away and pieces of his armour fall, his tone gets more and more desperate.
Not to kill Amicia, but for her to kill him. If you take too long in the fight, he’ll begin begging you to kill him, wanting you to send him to his son. He even says that one of them will die and the other will be cursed for eternity. And all the while as Amicia gets the upper hand, she also grows more desperate, begging Conrad to stop, that she doesn’t want to do this. But in the end there isn’t really an option, and you bean him in the head with a rock like Goliath and he stands there, stunned, until he falls to his knees and collapses in the mud.
Hugo was watching this time. He saw Amicia kill a man. He knows what she did, but at this point their argument is forgotten, for the time being, and he embraces her. Right before they have to run from the mob, of course.
There are many moments like this, where Amicia has to do something just utterly brutal, often made worse by Hugo having to see it. After another fight where she lashes out at her brother’s naive and childlike — some might say innocent (me, its me, I’m the some) — tantrum, Amicia and Lucas work together to lure a pig into a barn, where Amicia shoots out the two lanterns… letting the swarm of rats in the barn devour the pig so that the three can make it to the basement, to gain the first weapon upgrade.
Video games will often try to make you feel bad about moral choices that you’re forced into. “Commit a war crime to advance the plot” and then they want you to feel bad about committing a war crime. But oh my God, nothing made me feel worse than this little five year old realizing what I’m about to do, and Amicia telling him to look away, and Hugo telling her that he hates her for it. His cries of sadness when the pig was eaten were so gut wrenching. It hurt so much more than many other times games have tried to make me feel bad for letting an NPC get murdered.
Even when you aren’t actively trying, you can still cause death and suffering as well. With Lucas and Hugo in tow, I guided Amicia through the guts of a wrecked siege engine in the body strewn fields of a Guyenne and at the end of the siege engine was a man trapped by a door that wouldn’t open. At first he was glad to see me, and my torchlight. He thought I could help him. But instead I could only push the rats towards him as they scurried to get out of my light. Amicia told Hugo to look away here, but there’s no way he didn’t hear the screams.
For a while, the game makes you feel every murder you commit. Amicia expresses grief and guilt every time she’s forced to kill someone, or put out their light so that the rats will eat them. But eventually that has to change. After making it through the corpses piled up at Guyenne, Amicia and Hugo are captured by the English forces and ransomed, only to be freed by Melie and Arthur. I don’t know whether or not its possible to get through the following section without killing anyone, but let’s just say that when I got my sling back I was not inclined to find out. In stealth games I usually try to ghost through the areas, but the first thing I did — almost before Melie even suggested that if I knew how to use the sling, I should take point — was lob a rock into a man’s skull.
As the Amicia, Hugo, and Melie crept through the camp, I continued to take no prisoners and was more concerned with making it through than I was with making it through without raising my kill count. I wasn’t even halfway through before I’d doubled the people Amicia had murdered to survive, and even the more world wise and jaded Melie was shocked at Amicia’s insistence that she was done running.
I didn’t really need to worry, there aren’t multiple endings or anything, so the only side effect of a body count is a bunch of children being horrified, but these child actors are good enough that they really sell it well.
Doing what she needs to in order to survive in this world really gets to Amicia, though. Near the end of the game, after Hugo’s own naivete and innocence has led him to run off in search of Beatrice after finding out that she’s alive, Amicia chases after him only to fall down a gorge and bang her head, with the entire chapter being an extended dream sequence where her unconscious mind berates her for the way that she’s been treating her brother.
As Amicia travels through the ravine she fell into, the forest gives way to the plagueridden village, and then Laurentius’ farm, and finally a door opens leading her to the upstairs hallway of her manor house, leading to Hugo’s room. In each location she’s met by one of the other characters of her journey — the old woman Clervie, the doctor Laurentius, and finally Beatrice herself — and each of them chastize her for how she’s treated Hugo, pushing him away and lying to him, and all the things she doesn’t want to admit to herself that she’s done. “A child doesn’t run away for no reason” Clervie tells her when Amicia claims she hasn’t been arguing with Hugo. “It’s easy to spill blood, but harder to love” Laurentius chides when she claims to have done everything she could, even horrible things. “You didn’t think about his emotions” Beatrice finally says, saying that Hugo doesn’t want to talk to her. When she finally relents and lets Amicia through, I honest to God expected the little Hugo hallucination playing on the floor to explode into a swarm of rats or something.
Instead he simply voices her fears. Claiming that he didn’t want her to know that their mummy was alive, and that she’s jealous of him. He pushes her down and Amicia hears Hugo afraid and crying out, and she goes and does what she does best and murders some people, and once again when he asks about Mummy she refuses to tell him the truth, so this hallucination of Hugo runs away as well, claiming to hear Mummy in trouble. Even as the player, and so Amicia, hears it, she still tells him that he’s mistaken.
At this point as the player you’ve been lulled into thinking he hallucination was over, with Amicia waking up from it in the ravine, but then as you chase Hugo through the woods and into an incongruous chapel area, you go through one of the horrible organic rat tunnels, only to wade through corpses, which even line the walls, and grab at Amicia, imploring her to stay here, because she took their lives. But she did it for Hugo, and she defiantly shouts that she’d kill them all again. The entire sequence is fucking horrifying and playing through it the first time it was definitely my favourite chapter.
The nightmare ends as the tunnel of bodies gives way to an infinite blackness filled with the chittering swarms and beady eyes of the rats, which Amicia also wades through to get to her brother, the one little light in the darkness. But she can’t get to him in time as the imposing Lord Nicholas offers to take him to his mother, and the two walk off as Amicia is covered and devoured by the rats.
In the next chapter, its Hugo’s turn to finally commit horrible murders after breaking Beatrice out of the Inquisition’s jail. With the power to control rats, he’s forced to use that power by Vitalis to have his little friends devour everyone who tries to attack his mother, protecting her from the knights ready to give their lives to strengthen the Macula. In the end he passes out, and they capture Beatrice and Hugo again. For an entire month he’s shaped and molded by Vitalis, and Beatrice puts up with all sorts of tortures. At first he returns with Lord Nicholas to kill Amicia and his friends, but Amicia wades through the swarms of rats to come hold her baby brother again, and he comes to his senses. Just in time to fight Nicholas, who for some reason is able to set himself on fucking fire to keep the rats away.
When in the penultimate chapter, when the orphans ruthlessly decide to go with Melie’s plan to take on the entire Inquisition by themselves (with an army of rats, of course), Hugo doesn’t seem concerned when he directs his chittering little minions to swarm over the soldiers. He’s still a five year old, and worried about how they’ll succeed, but his innocence is tarnished a little. Its still painful for Hugo when he sees Roderic die, shot through with arrows and bleeding out. Even after everything he experienced, he still cares for people. It was painful for me, too, for that matter. I knew what was going to happen to Roderic when he started being so friendly with Hugo and bonding with him, telling him how strong he was. I’m familiar with storytelling tropes, and I was surprised Lucas and Melie didn’t suffer the same fate as Roderic and Arthur. But even after dying so many times that it became frustrating, Roderic’s death was such an emotional gut punch, just like with sacrificing the pig.
After defeating Vitalis, Hugo gains some of his old nature back. Throughout the game there are many places where Hugo will show off his childlike wonder for the world outside of his quarantine bedroom, looking at rotten fruit, or bubbles in the water, or the pigs in Laurentius’ farm that are still alive. In the epilogue, he still has this wonder, urging Amicia to play a stone throwing target shoot fair game.
When two men outside the village center’s fair — to celebrate three days without rats — turn Hugo away, suspecting correctly that he’s the boy who three days ago was wanted by the Inquisition, he feels dejected and sad, even as Amicia tries to cheer him up. Its a bittersweet ending, with Melie having left the remaining trio. Hugo claims she left because she hates him. Its just Lucas, the siblings, and a still sickly Beatrice. But Amicia teases and plays with Hugo as Lucas guides the wagon to the harbor, and the camera pans up onto a bright day, where there’s hope for the heroes.
Religion and Fanaticism
Plague Tale is steeped in religious trappings. Its kind of hard to ignore when the villain is the head of the Inquisition, a real world organization, and he’s excommunicated by the Pope, a real world figure. Even if Benevent Vitalis is a fictional character, the entity that he represents is something real, and something distinctly Catholic.
Or at least, the organization itself is Catholic. Benevent and his Inquisition don’t ever actually reference anything even remotely Catholic, and if not for the symbolism of crosses (albeit fantastical ones), you could easily mistake the game for taking place in some fantasy setting. The Inquisition looks like something from Dungeons & Dragons, with their big, bulky armoured knights with spiked greaves (to keep the rats off their feet and legs), with some of them carrying flaming maces or spear lanterns. Lord Nicholas is practically a Darth Vader figure, imposing, his silhouette powerful and mysterious with his massive hood and the stylized helmet that conceals his face, even up to his untimely, rat gnawed death. Not to mention the mystical alchemists who brew up magical potions. Very unlikely that the historical Inquisition had those.
The Inquisition is deemed heretical by an Archbishop from the Vatican who comes to excommunicate Vitalis and his soldiers while Hugo eavesdrops. The Inquisition soldiers who take the archbishop to his meeting are rude to him, standing up for Vitalis. Many of them seem more than willing to die for the Grand Inquisitor. At one point, as Hugo sneaks through the Bastion’s dungeons following Lord Nicholas, he comes across a room where nearly a dozen men are being exsanguinated over a pit of specially bred white rats, feeding them their blood. The alchemist in the room’s dialogue to these dying men, along with their kneeling positions, makes it hard to tell whether they were prisoners or volunteers.
Regardless of any tenuous connections to real world Catholicism, the Inquisitors view Vitalis as their messiah figure, and believe that he can remake the world with the power of the Macula that he now controls. And many of them actually do sacrifice themselves for it, whether its going after Hugo’s mother knowing that he’ll send rats at them, or being sacrificed to Vitalis’ army of white rats.
Vitalis isn’t the only powerful and violently deranged religious figure in the game. Conrad Malfort, the game’s first boss, also fills that role. We don’t exactly get much to go on, but the townsfolk clearly look to him for leadership, and after the death of his son to the Bite, he’s gone off the deep end and started burning people at the stake. The whole village seems griped in his fervor, willing to go along with his demands and chase down an innocent pair of siblings, and eventually face off against Amicia in a fight to the death that he isn’t actually all that interested in winning.
Religion isn’t entirely portrayed as a negative, though. The monks of the abbey are helpful, albeit the only one you actually meet warns you to stay in the light and then walks out of the protective glow of the torch, only to be devoured by rats. Amicia, too, is given the option to pray at altars when she comes to them, though she does so with the innocence of a child, praying that (the Virgin Mary? God?) take care of her poor dog, Lion, who was killed by the rats before everything went tits up.
Alchemy itself is also presented religiously, with the Macula being the first impurity, and the history of it catalogued in the Sanguinis Itinera, which seems like some kind of a quasi-religious text. When Lucas and Amicia go to the secret de Rune Roman bathhouse, it feels like a religious temple. Albeit a gamified one where you need to complete the secret puzzle to unlock a hidden laboratory. Lucas certainly treats it that way, with the alchemical Sanguinis Itenera being treated as a holy text (it was after all hidden beneath the church), and the magnum opus being a holy elixir. He views the craft as something sacred, and even views the Macula that way, calling it the first corruption.
What the Hell is Going On?
There are so many unanswered questions with Plague Tale, and this is one game where I actually feel like a sequel is fitting and warranted. This story about a brother and sister coming together and struggling against both a powerful external force as well as the shady mysterious legacy of their family history is really emotional and impactful, but also what the absolute fuck was with all the rats?
This world and its lore had only the surface scratched. The Macula clearly has some kind of connection to rats, but why? Is the plague itself connected to the rats? Here the rats themselves spread the plague, as opposed to in real life where the plague was spread by the fleas, so are they magical rats, or is the disease itself magical? Is some profane intelligence guiding the rats that causes them to try to attack Lucas while he makes the magnum opus, and why does it suddenly stop when he succeeds? Why do the Inquisition’s white rats fed on blood not fear the light, and how does Vitalis control them but Hugo can’t?
I want to know more about this world. The ending is so abrupt. You fight Vitalis and his waves and waves of white rats in the heart of the Bastion among pews filled with victims sacrificed to Benevent’s unholy Coronation, and once Amicia has caved his skull in with enough rocks, he dies and the problem goes away. But before the credits roll, the camera zooms in on Hugo dramatically, showing his placid face.
What was Vitalis planning? Was he going to take over the world somehow? With rats? Did it have something to do with the Episanguis crystals that the rats produce as some kind of a byproduct in their gross fleshy nests that are built out of the corpses of the people they’ve devoured? I’m no zoologist, but that doesn’t seem like normal rat behavior. How do they even make these nests? Is it vomited out? I’d rather that than the other alternative. Only sometimes does it seem that they’ve dragged the corpses into the walls.
Would the rats make Vitalis into a God or something? He seemed to imply that to the Archbishop that came to excommunicate the Inquisition. But how? Would he simply control all the rats and take over the world? It feels like the implication is more mythical than that. Guards talk about him being able to cure the Bite, for everyone possibly, and seem to think some kind of a supernatural rapture will take place, but they also believe there will be a party afterwards, and that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that happens when you all go to heaven, so whatever the original plan was, it was something earthly.
There’s a sequel to A Plague Tale coming out in 2022, and I’m actually interested in it. There are many places to go to expand the story that wouldn’t feel like they’re tacked on. Perhaps with the siblings exploring their own family history, and learning about the Prima Macula to better save Hugo from any of the unfortunate side effects, like headaches and nausea, or starting another plague. I personally wonder, based on a little bit of implication from Vitalis and a lot of bit of wild mass guessing from me, that Amicia might actually be adopted, or maybe even illegitimate and from a different mother than Hugo. Or it could just be that the Macula only appears in boys. The plague child from the sixth century also was a boy. The mural in the Roman bathhouse also depicted ravens, not rats, so maybe there’s a progression to be had.
Whatever the case, A Plague Tale’s sequel is certainly to be just as interesting as the first game. In the end, exploring the mysteries of the setting (why is the Chateau d’Ombrage built specifically as a rat trap hundreds of years before the rat plague started?) aren’t really what’s important. Regardless of what Benevent Vitalis and the Inquisition had planned for Hugo and the rats, what ultimately drove the story was the relationship between the children. Between Amicia and Hugo, but also between Arthur and Melie, and Arthur and Roderic, and Lucas and Melie, and Roderic and Hugo and so on. While some of their friends have died or run off on their own to be alone, I’d like to see more of that in the sequel than I would more about the Prima Macula’s origins and powers.
Hi. End of the article. Thank you for reading. Especially after I started with a plea for money. Once again, any help you can give is appreciated. You can read (and share!) my other essays, become a long term supporter, or simply send me a one time donation. I’m going to be trying to do this more often.
I’m currently banned from Twitter, though, fingers crossed, hopefully I can work through that and keep this account instead of starting from square zero. That means it’s even more important that people share my work.
I’ll hopefully have a version of this voiced and up on Youtube eventually.
