FRIENDLY FIRE
Asobo’s sprawling sequel feels like the response to a customer survey asking what players wanted to see more of from a successor to A Plague Tale: Innocence, returned with every box ticked. There is more bonding time between protagonist Amicia de Rune and her younger brother Hugo, still afflicted with the ‘macula’ disease that allows him to control rats, whose swarms here swell to biblical proportions. The game’s stealth palette has expanded, too, and Amicia’s arsenal with it, leading to a broader range of ways to evade capture and to take down guards in gruesome fashion. Environments are more attractive, more detailed and larger in scale – with the side-effect that its puzzles ensure you’ll spend perhaps an hour of the 20-plus it takes to reach the credits (almost twice the original’s runtime) turning cranks, pulling ropes and shunting heavy carts extremely slowly. And one chapter pushes back the contrived blockades and invisible barriers still further, for the kind of pseudo-open-world interlude so beloved by Naughty Dog. In E374’s cover story, we suggested Requiem appeared to follow The Last Of Us Part II’s approach to sequel making; for better and worse, it follows that game’s maximalist template to the letter.