A Plague Tale: Requiem Review

Requiem is a mid-size French studio out-rendering companies ten times its headcount. The rat technology, up to 300,000 individually simulated bodies pouring over rooftops and swallowing towns in real time, is the visual signature, but the S also covers Provence light on olive groves, drifting pollen fields, and an island whose reveal is one of the generation's best vistas. Asobo's Flight Simulator engine work clearly fed back in.

The story earns its A by refusing comfort: Amicia's escalating capacity for violence is interrogated rather than celebrated, Hugo's arc runs somewhere genuinely bleak, and the ending has the courage of its themes. Gameplay is the honest B. The stealth is checkpointed corridor-puzzling with instant-fail edges, combat tools outpace enemy variety by hour six, and chase sequences lean on trial and error. You play Requiem for what it shows and what it says; what it asks your hands to do is merely adequate.