A Plague Tale: Innocence (APTI) is not without its flaws. The flaws it has aren't subtle either but pretty evident by the time you reach the end of the game. But all that can be overlooked as where it shines, it shines brighter than any other game I have played in a long while, and it shines on things I value the most in video games: a story worth playing through and characters worth knowing. Video games are well established as a medium of artistic expression. Like movies, it has stories and presentation but unlike movies, you make your own moves and present the story to yourself, instead of having a camera do that for you. APTI has that from the beginning - a story within itself which it wants to unfurl and is waiting for you to uncover its chapters. Unlike games like Hellblade or the Dark Pictures Anthology series which focus entirely on the narrative, APTI is a complete video game. It has levels, it progresses the characters and has abilities to unlock, upgrade and by the end of the game you would have progressed significantly as a player of the game. These are video game tropes we are used to seeing in action games for years, and APTI makes its place among those games by virtue of its structure and mechanics. As you uncover the secrets of the story your character will get stronger and more equipped to handle the situation, while you will have to collect materials from the levels to upgrade these abilities. The enemies will get stronger as well, and by the end, you will require to use all your learnt abilities to fight them off. Classic action game.
But that is not where it earns its medals. The essence, element of this game lies with the characters, their struggles, their motivation and their development over the course of the game. Set in the 1300s, it tells the story of a young girl and her brother amidst a plague-invested France being invaded by the English forces for reasons too complicated for their innocent minds. But life doesn't give them the time to buckle up, instead leaves them to fend for themselves, and each other while throwing adversities meant for heroes twice, thrice their age and experience. Right from the start, you realise you are grossly underprepared and underpowered to fight with what is going on, and what is going on feels too much for a young girl and a child of 5. The first act, and through the second is very much a horror game. The horrors of war, political power, selfishness and the horrors of a plague. The setup is beautiful - seeing the horrors unfolding through the eyes of young children as they desperately try to grasp for logic and meaning to what seems to be wrong that is spreading faster than they can comprehend. Why the invasion, why the brutality, why the plague and most striking of all why the human spirit behaves the way it does in an emergency, a situation they have not seen before. The lovely Amicia and Hugo thanks in part to their aristocratic upbringing are lost in a world they must try to make sense of while unearthing their relationship as siblings. The more difficulties they face, they realise they must rely on each other, trust and put faith in one another if they are to survive, and then try to find out why Hugo is so important in all this. The story is always progressing, always shedding light on the background of the characters you meet along the way and on each other. More than the mechanics of the game which make you more powerful and equipped to fight, the development is in these characters - a bunch of orphans teaming up for their own purposes and helping each other find peace in a world that seem too strange to comprehend. The story might seem too foggy at the start, but slowly unfolds into a mixture of rooted in reality and fantasy with strong characters on either side of the board each with their own motivations, and it unfolds very organically. There are no large exposition plot dumps but everything you discover, you discover in due time with sufficient importance to each plot point in wonderful settings around the countryside, claustrophobic village alleyways, underground tunnels, dilapidated buildings and around the horrifying rat infestation which never loses its scare factor throughout the game.
Despite a strong cast of characters, a special mention goes to Amicia who develops into one of video games best new heroines with her resolve and heart of love for her brother and her family. Her motivation is not to save the world or even her country. It's to make sense of her new surroundings but to first save her brother from a mysterious illness and then to find her family, or what is left of it, all while making new friends in the pit of adversity. From a scared young girl, we see her becoming an iron-willed elder sister who will protect her brother at any cost but never loses her charm or her innocence. Despite her growth, she never hides the fact that she is still a young girl who should be reading storybooks about knights in castles and dreaming of her own. Even after being forced to kill people to save her own self and her brother, she never gets used to killing. She grows but doesn't morph. By the end, you don't see a new person. You see a person coming of age passing trial after trial, upgrading whatever she had as a child to protect herself and becomes a woman. The tremble in her voice changes, her demeanour doesn't. The horrors never stop being horrifying, you never feel too confident heading into a new area. You feel you have just enough if you use your mind and your surroundings. It is this balance of character development in both story and gameplay that the Tomb Raider games were heading for but could never get the balance right. Amicia never becomes a heroine, a knight. She becomes an elder sister first, a guardian then, and a friend in the end.
The game does have some small drawbacks. The enemy AI is dumb as all hell and you get off easy without using stealth to the fullest almost every time. Finding the materials required for upgrading often asks you to explore a bit too much which can take away the immersion and the ending might come off a bit too Resident Evil-ish which just pulls my hand away from a perfect 10 rating, but what matters the most is that the game is worth playing more than any other contemporary single-player campaign just to see how a story and proper development can create characters that will stay with you forever. The graphics are excellent, the design of the levels are spectacular, the voice acting is cinema-worthy and the presentation is hugely successful in creating a grim, brutal setting far from modern while having the intricacies of the time period. Its a thoroughly enjoyable experience that will leave a mark in your mind.