There is a moment about eleven hours into A Plague Tale: Requiem where the rats stop being an obstacle and just straight up become like the weather. You come over a rise and the ground below is moving, rumbling beneath. Not scurrying, not swarming in the way games usually mean it, moving like an ocean wave, in one direction, toward you.
Asobo Studio built that scene on a specific number. The first game, A Plague Tale: Innocence, could render about 5,000 rats at once. Requiem raised that to 300,000, nearly a sixtyfold increase, because the studio dropped last generation hardware entirely and built their new game for PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC only. Lead engine programmer Nicolas Becavin described wanting the swarms to read as a tsunami piling over infinitely washing over, rather than the tornado shape the first game used.
I bring up their technical achievement first because it is the easiest thing to admire and the least interesting thing about the game. What actually stays with you is their story, a fifteen year old girl running out of options, and beginning their descent towards madness.
Where it picks up
Requiem starts six months after Innocence. Amicia de Rune and her younger brother Hugo have fled south with their mother Beatrice and their friend Lucas, looking for a way to control the Prima Macula, the ancient curse in Hugo’s blood that lets him command the rats and is also killing him. A prophesized island might hold the cure, but it does not go well.
You don’t need to play Innocence first, or need knowledge from it. The game catches you up, but the emotional maths only works if you watched Amicia go from a sheltered noble daughter to someone who kills, so I would play Innocence first, it is about ten hours, and absolutely worth it.
What you actually do
Amicia carries a sling, and that is the whole combat system at the start, and it remains as a core mechanic: a stone to the head kills an unhelmeted guard, and the aiming has real weight to it, with a wind up that punishes you for holding the shot too long, firing automatically when held too long.
Around the sling, Asobo stacks alchemy. Ignifer lights braziers and sets things burning. Extinguis puts fires out, which matters enormously because rats will not cross light, so extinguishing a torch is functionally the same as opening a door for a hundred thousand teeth. Odoris draws the swarm to a spot. Tar spreads flame. Every encounter is a small physics problem with light and rodents as your tools, and the good ones let you solve them three or four different ways.
The best encounters in the game are the ones where the guards and the rats are both hazards to each other. A patrol carrying torches is safe from the swarm but visible to you. Snuff their light and the problem solves itself, very amusingly heh. There is a stretch in a flooded quarry where I spent twenty minutes doing nothing but repositioning fire, never once firing the sling, and it is the most satisfied I have been with a stealth section in years. Asobo also quietly tracks how you play and unlocks upgrades accordingly, so a stealth run and an aggressive run end up with meaningfully different Amicia by the halfway point. The playstyles are labeled as prudence, opportunism and aggressive. Ranging from 0 – 20%, 20 – 50%, 51 – 100% respectively in kills to get each skillset.
Requiem also hands Amicia a crossbow, and this is where I have my quips.
My problem with it
The crossbow gives you a reliable, silent, lethal answer to armoured enemies. It is fun, but it is also the moment the game’s argument gets muddy, because Requiem wants to be a story about a girl being hollowed out by violence while simultaneously giving her a competent action game arsenal and levelling her up for using it.
Innocence worked partly because Amicia was underequipped. Every kill felt like a compromise. In Requiem there are stretches, particularly in the middle third, where she is clearing rooms with the confidence of a Naughty Dog protagonist, and then a cutscene arrives to tell you she is horrified by what she has become. The game portrays one thing and the narrative says otherwise.
Plenty of critics disagreed with me, and the numbers back them as well. Requiem sits at 83 on OpenCritic with 88 percent of 162 critics recommending it, which puts it in the top tenth of games on the site. On Steam it holds around 91 percent positive across more than 7,600 reviews. I am the minority here and I know it. I still think Innocence is the tighter game and Requiem is the better one, which is an annoying thing to believe and I have never fully reconciled it.
What is not in dispute is the presentation. Olivier Deriviere’s score is the best work in either game, and Charlotte McBurney’s performance as Amicia does a lot of the load bearing when the writing gets on the nose. The 14th century France and Mediterranean settings are stunning in a way that has nothing to do with polygon counts and everything to do with art direction. This is just my personal gripe with it, it’s still a great mechanic that’s well thought out, and open to a wider playstyle, so don’t worry about it.
Length, chapters, and pacing
There are 17 chapters in A Plague Tale: Requiem, the same count as Innocence, though the chapters here are considerably longer. Main story runs roughly 15 to 20 hours. Chasing every souvenir, herbarium flower and feather pushes you toward 20 to 27 hours. New Game Plus unlocks after your first finish, and there are two ending variants, though the difference is small enough that replaying the final chapter covers it.
The pacing sags in the middle. Chapters ten through twelve lean hard on combat arenas, and that is exactly the stretch where my objection above bites hardest. The last three chapters are short and heavily cinematic. The final hour is one of the strongest endings in a game this decade, and I will not say anything else about it.
On PS5 specifically
The PS5 version is the one I would point people to. It was built for the hardware rather than ported to it, and the DualSense work is genuinely thoughtful: the sling’s tension sits in the adaptive triggers, arrows and stones travel through the controller speaker, and during chase sequences the swarm registers as a stereo rumble that moves. Loading is close to instant, which matters more than it sounds when the game expects you to die repeatedly in stealth sections.
PC and Xbox Series X hold up fine. There is no last generation version and there never will be.
Where it sits in the series, and why now matters
A Plague Tale games in order is simple. Innocence came out 14 May 2019 and comes first chronologically. Requiem followed on 18 October 2022 and picks up six months later. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy arrives 27 August 2026, and it is a prequel set 15 years before Requiem, following Sophia, the smuggler introduced in Requiem, on Minotaur Island off Crete.
| Game | Released | Setting | Main story length |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Plague Tale: Innocence | 14 May 2019 | 1348, wartime France | About 10 hours |
| A Plague Tale: Requiem | 18 October 2022 | Six months later, travelling south | 15 to 20 hours |
| Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy | 27 August 2026 | 15 years before Requiem, off Crete | About 20 hours |
So: Innocence, then Requiem, then Resonance, even though Resonance is earliest in the timeline. Play it in release order. Sophia lands differently if you already know her.
Resonance is a real departure. Asobo has moved the combat toward fast melee, with a grappling hook for repositioning, and the studio has said no prior series knowledge is needed. It runs about 20 hours, launches on PS5, Xbox Series X and S and PC, and is on Xbox Game Pass day one. That last detail is why this review exists now. If you have Game Pass, you are about to get handed the third game in a series whose second game you may never have played, and Requiem regularly drops below fifteen dollars.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to play A Plague Tale: Innocence first?
No, but you should. Requiem summarises the plot, but Amicia’s arc is the point of the series, and it starts in the first game. Innocence takes about ten hours, and I strongly recommend playing it.
Is A Plague Tale: Requiem scary?
It is not a horror game, but it is grim and dark. There is a lot of child death, disease, and bodies. The rat sequences are genuinely unpleasant if rodents bother you. It is rated Mature for a reason.
How does it run on PS5 in 2026?
Well. It shipped with some technical rough edges, mostly frame pacing during the largest swarm sequences, and patches smoothed most of that out. This is still one of the better looking games on the console.
Is it worth playing before Resonance?
Yes, for one reason: Sophia. She is a supporting character in Requiem and the lead in the prequel. Everything else in Resonance is designed to work without prior knowledge. So check it out if you can.
Is there any multiplayer or open world?
Neither. It is a linear, single player, chapter based action adventure with stealth and puzzles. If that is not what you want, nothing about Requiem will change your mind.
Four years on, Requiem is still the clearest example of what a mid-sized studio can do when it stops trying to compete on scope. Asobo has said the series was built on what it calls a AA philosophy, which means cinematic ambition on a focused budget. That approach produced a game with 300,000 rats and about six characters who matter. The rats may be the headline that hooks audiences, but the six characters are why anyone remembers it.
