A Plague Tale: Requiem

Ты снова Амеция, снова таскаешь за собой своего бесячего братца Гуго, но теперь вместо грязной Франции вы сваливаете на солнечный остров 🌴. И вот тут контраст просто выносит мозг: Сверху — лазурное небо, пальмы, бирюзовая вода, белый песок. Снизу — реки из крыс, которые кишат в каждой пещере, под каждым камнем и в твоих кошмарах. Разработчики гордятся, что теперь на экране может быть до 300 000 крыс одновременно . Это не просто орда — это живое цунами из хвостов и зубов, которое может сожрать целую армию за 3 секунды. Выглядит это настолько эпично и жутко, что хочется аплодировать, даже когда ты в панике от них убегаешь. За графику — 👌 (лучший визуал 2022 года). За крыс — 🐀🐀🐀 (их реально много и это АХУЕННО). За сюжет — 💔 (ты будешь плакать, но это того стоило). За Гуго — 🤦 (бесил, но жалко). Короче: Requiem — это эпичный, красивый и душераздирающий шедевр. Крыс больше, остров красивее, слёз — океан. Обязательно играть, но запасись пачкой салфеток. И без крыс там никуда, ты уже понял. 😭🐀🌴 Оценка: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5)

YES

Do yourself a flavour and play Innocence instead This Is one of the worst sequels I have ever played, they went from a beautifully dark gothic French horror with one of the greatest aesthetics I have ever seen, immersion French accents, music all brilliant as is the writing with an adrenalise desperation that kept me on the edge of my chair. Then these absolute *%&£@@&&£",÷ *£*£>#>&&= $|€£#*@*# thought "I know lets take a big fat steamy *** on it" with it's bright, sunshine Mediterranean, English accent, bad writing failure of a donky kick in the b*lls the only and I mean the only good thing about this game is Amecia's outfit is pretty cool and the crossbow... oh wait! you can't use the dam thing because there's no bleedin ammo till the very fekin end!!!! And now these absolute #*£*£*$¡●♤●*£&£;£&£# want to follow suit and release a 3rd even bigger steamy pile of **** My dissapointed is immesurable and my day is ruined.

Игра года 2022. Одна из лучших игр в которые я играл, на две головы выше первой части. А финал... мое уважение!

A Plague Tale: Requiem - 2022 Sequel to Innocence and one of the nominees for GOTY 2022 — further proof that the people in charge of the GOTY awards understand videogames about as well as the Academy understands arthouse cinema — I finally got around to playing this after having it gather dust in my horrifying backlog. I didn't dislike Innocence. It was derivative and fairly rough around the edges, but I thought it was a decent AA game. With Requiem, Asobo Studio clearly wanted to move up a league and deliver its first blockbuster. The result? On paper, spectacular: over 3 million copies sold, a prequel/spin-off on the way, another sequel teased, and nominations at pretty much every major award show. But once you actually pick up the controller, it's a different story. Requiem continues the story of the first game: a grim adventure set in a fantasy version of 14th-century France, starring siblings Amicia and Hugo. Amicia is a teenage warrior tasked with protecting her younger brother, who suffers from a sort of supernatural curse that allows him to summon and control plague rats. Add secret alchemical orders, ancient prophecies, religious fanatics and all that good stuff. A Plague Tale doesn't even try to hide how much it resembles The Last of Us, with a little Assassin's Creed thrown in, both in its gameplay and its themes. It inherits the ambition, the grammar and, unfortunately, the flaws of those games. The gameplay loop is basically The Last of Us Part II: stealth sections, conveniently placed tall grass, hiding, attacking, environmental puzzles and crafting items on the fly. The only thing missing is that here we have magic rats. And yes, many of TLOU2's problems are here as well: companions who are apparently invisible to enemies, repetitive gameplay loops, brain-dead AI even on higher difficulties, tacky invisible walls and a few bugs from time to time. The only remotely interesting idea is the progression system. Instead of traditional XP, your skill tree develops according to how you approach stealth sections. Unfortunately, the implementation is so clumsy that it ends up feeling more like a nuisance than an actual incentive to play differently. Fine. This is a cinematic adventure game. It's not Prey, Dishonored or BioShock. I'm not expecting an immersive sim. Surely the storytelling will make up for it, then. Surely the story will be memorable. Right? Oh, boy. Despite the developers repeatedly insisting that they wanted to maintain a certain degree of narrative realism, you are apparently expected to accept Amicia walking around constantly armed and dressed in men's clothing, complete with light armour, in a historical period where this would have been socially unacceptable and, in some circumstances, punishable. The bigger problem is that the game never bothers to justify why literally nobody seems to care. Not soldiers, not peasants, not priests, not pilgrims. Apparently medieval France collectively decided that this was fine. And this is where I want to stop for a moment. Compared to the first game, Amicia has been transformed into the classic Netflix/Amazon Prime girlboss: she massacres entire armies of soldiers (we'll get to that), is constantly screaming, literally calls herself an Amazon, and handles complex weapons such as crossbows despite having no meaningful training with them. In the default English dub, the actress even drops the French accent from the first game in favour of a generic British one, which is why I played the entire thing in French, as I found this decision pretty off-putting. Amicia has essentially become a Millie Bobby Brown character. And no, that is absolutely not a compliment. The plot, which I won't spoil, is an enormous pile of shameless The Last of Us Part II and Assassin's Creed borrowings, complete with secret orders, ancient prophecies and magical artefacts. The twists are painfully predictable. From the very first cinematic when the characters arrive on La Cuna, you can already tell which movies the writers were “inspired” by and where the story is going. This continues all the way to the painfully obvious, aggressively melodramatic ending. And because one permanently pissed-off girlboss apparently wasn't enough, the game introduces another one in the form of the pirate Sophia, who will apparently be the protagonist of the prequel/spin-off coming out in a few weeks. Beyond the secret orders, prophecies and assorted nonsense, much of the story focuses — much like TLOU2 — on the psychological consequences of committing violence. This isn't a particularly original theme, but it certainly isn't a bad one. Unfortunately, Requiem handles it in the laziest way possible. Even The Last of Us Part II, a game I consider massively overrated as I've written before, manages to tackle this subject reasonably well. Here, the game merely pretends to engage with it. Or, if you prefer, it does so in an extremely superficial way. The story keeps insisting on showing us the psychological consequences of Amicia's actions, while the gameplay loop remains completely unchanged. You kill dozens upon dozens of people, and the game occasionally reminds you that this is psychologically damaging. Then you go back to killing dozens upon dozens of people. And even on a narrative level, aside from the predictable ending, there is very little actual consequence to any of it. I'm sorry, but after Spec Ops: The Line, Undertale, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and even TLOU2 itself, making a game about the psychological consequences of violence and handling the subject this superficially is doubly disappointing. And then we have the rats. The rats were a sinister and genuinely unsettling threat in the first game. Here they've gone full Michael Bay. They suddenly appear by the millions, tear down buildings, towers and castles, and basically destroy everything in a few minutes. Bigger, louder, more rats. The good old American “bigger is better” philosophy apparently applies to plague rodents too. And then there is the sheer amount of shameless pandering. A lot of the fandom's discussions seem to revolve around shipping — who should supposedly f**k whom — and whether character X is gay or not, rather than the actual gameplay, builds or mechanics. And I can't help but wonder whether the writers deliberately leave relationships and sexual orientations vague because they know exactly what kind of discourse this generates. Why bother writing an actual romantic subplot or explicitly establishing a character's sexuality when you can just throw enough suggestive dialogue at the audience to keep the shipping discourse going forever? In the end, A Plague Tale: Requiem is an ambitious but extremely superficial game. The gameplay is weak, the plot is faux-deep Netflix melodrama, and the game has almost no sense of immersion, either mechanically or narratively. It feeds heavily on the success and conventions of bigger games such as The Last of Us Part II and modern Assassin's Creeds, without the budget to cover up the overwhelming stench of mediocrity. It also has a serious pacing problem — one that TLOU2 unfortunately shares — and is far too long, with its runtime frequently padded for no good reason. The trailer for the upcoming pirate-focused spin-off starring Sophia, which looks like a mediocre Assassin's Creed Odyssey-style action game, somehow looks even worse than Requiem. And the now-mandatory post-credit scene strongly suggests that another sequel is already on the way. What can I say? Unfortunately, there is clearly an audience for this kind of pretentious, shallow crap. I'll have to live with that.

I dont know where to start. Maybe I should say the only single one positive thing about this game instead: Good voice acting. Everything else is just so pathetically bad. Even the very nice graphics are somehow ruined with bleak colours and strange dust (light) rays that in some places ruin vicibility so much you get disorientated, then you realize its the HDR that is so not just bad, but in fact making it so much worse vs turn it off. Even then you only get the colours turned from 1% to ON. The random fog, red ambient light where is no sunset/torches and which switches randomly to blue... I could comment about gameplaye, but that part is so much worse. Its the worst. Total failure this game.

总体还是不错的，是第一作的全面升级，场景、玩法、时长都有提升。而且明亮开阔的场景比例大幅提升，整体玩起来比第一作舒服。 但是战斗系统的加入有点水土不服。个人感觉没有对整体游戏体验给出正向帮助，反而扰乱或者打破了游戏节奏，比如潜行可以不用思考直接用弓弩莽过去，被发现了不会死甚至还可以直接反杀或者跑掉。整体感觉不如第一部沉浸感强。感觉是什么都想做一点，但是都是浅尝辄止。最后的结果就是一个字，乱。 最让人恼火的是，制作组对于匕首这个资源的获取非常苛刻，以至于到了游戏中后期完全不敢用匕首，否则很多辛苦找到的箱子就开不开，让人很无语。

I still haven't used the sling, it's better to let this world burn to ashes.. I guess this is the kind of game I'll never finish, even though I love it very much..... UPD [spoiler]Alright, after a night filled with bitter tears, I came back to this and gave him peace. It was his wish, even though this world doesn’t deserve to be saved[/spoiler] No matter how deeply I cherish this series and this game—for its rich narrative, its haunting atmosphere, and every character—the ending left a raw, aching wound in my heart and soul. I may never replay it again, for I don’t wish to stir that pain, but I’ll always be grateful to the developers for crafting a story so powerful it could break me.