A Plague Tale: Innocence

It was again time to knock few games off my wishlist by playing through them on the game pass. The first one was A Plague Tale: Innocence, a third person stealth adventure game from Asobo Studio. They're a French developer whose name I don't remember seeing before but they have been in the business for some time now. Currently they're working on Microsoft Flight Simulator which should increase their renown.

A simple yet well made adventure

With Innocence, Asobo wanted to create a game inspired by The Last of Us and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. I'd say they succeeded in their goal well even though I have experienced both of them only vicariously. Also, even if was not stated as a source of inspiration, the setting and escort stealth gameplay reminded me of Shadwen.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is set in 14th century France. There's a plague, rats, things go wrong and Amicia de Rune, the daughter of a noble family has to get to safety with her sickly little brother Hugo. Amicia is skilled in the use of a sling which comes in handy when guards need to be dispatched or some other obstacle is blocking the way. She also learns bit of alchemy, how to make flash bombs and such.

Innocence matched my expectations: a straightforward linear adventure with light crafting and upgrade systems. Its story is predictable but enjoyable enough. Only before the finale when the game temporarily switches to Hugo's perspective (as I guessed would happen at some point) I thought things dragged on a bit. Hugo lacks all the gameplay mechanics of Amicia, which made the section feel too long.

I tried to find all the collectibles but missed quite a few in the end. Even though the game is linear, there are all kinds little nooks and crannies cleverly hidden along the way. For a stealth game veteran, Innocence was not difficult. Solutions were effortless to come up with and there were more than enough resources around. That's probably good as the game uses a checkpoint-based save system that can get frustrating with too challenging stealth sections. During your journey you are also joined by different characters who give you additional options.

The game is fairly forgiving (at least on the default difficulty setting) on how much noise you can make without alerting everyone in an area with multiple enemies. Enemy AI is not the smartest either: I once found myself in a dead end after having been spotted and the guard didn't even come past the alley's corner to look. Another time I run around and crouched behind a waist-high wall and successfully got away from a guard two meters away. Being spotted in melee range does end the game immediately like in Shadwen however.

One very notable thing about Innocence is how beautiful it is, even on the medium settings I played it on. Maximum settings the game defaulted to were too much for a tolerable framerate. On medium I got near stable 60 but the game's aggressive vsync would lock it down to 30 whenever there was any serious dip. I had to disable it and enable Nvidia's adaptive vsync instead.

For some reason I had set my mind on that Alt F2 was Nvidia Shadowplay's screenshot hotkey. I had used it in Just Cause 4 where it would open photo mode (without pausing the game) and somehow thought that was normal even though I had used Alt F1 for instant screenshots in some other game in the past -- brain functions in such weird ways at times. In Innocence the photo mode didn't work (the game got minimized) and so I thought I couldn't use Shadowplay for screenshots. The game however has a built-in photo mode and so I got my pretty screenshots, just with HUD elements hidden. I suppose that only made them prettier though.