A Plague Tale: Innocence
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
The player kills soldiers with a sling and can lure rat swarms to devour them; humans are shown killed, burned, and bloodied, and corpses remain in the world.
The plot follows a sick child and his sister fleeing execution; their father, mother, and servants are killed on screen, plague-dead fill the world, and the children are forced to kill to survive.
Swarms of flesh-eating rats hunt the player through darkness, and the game frightens by making the player flee a horde it cannot fight.
Occasional moderate profanity surfaces in tense dialogue between characters.
Wine and alcohol appear as part of the medieval world; not used by the player for effect.
Sibling thieves aid the children and the player retrieves a forbidden book by stealth; theft occurs within the story.
Rats are killed en masse with fire as a core mechanic, and the family's dog is devoured early in the story.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a story-driven stealth adventure set in 1348 France during the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death. You control Amicia, a teenage noble girl protecting her sick five-year-old brother Hugo as they flee soldiers of the Inquisition and swarms of flesh-eating rats. Play is mostly sneaking, solving environmental puzzles with fire and light, and using a sling to distract or kill guards — often by luring them into the rats. The content includes realistic medieval violence with blood and on-screen death, people burned or devoured alive, and pervasive body horror in the form of plague corpses and skeletal remains. The tone is bleak throughout: the children witness their father and household killed, are hunted continually, and live surrounded by death. Rat swarms create frequent survival-horror tension when the player cannot fight back. The game is single-player with no online features, no purchases, and no sexual content.
How it's framed
The game frames its violence as desperate survival — Amicia kills reluctantly to protect Hugo, and the narrative dwells on the cost of what the children endure rather than treating killing as triumphant. The Inquisition is presented as the aggressor, and the supernatural thread — Hugo's inherited affliction and his growing control over the rats — is handled as a fantasy plot device rather than as real-world occult ritual.
Details
- Developer
- Asobo Studio
- Publisher
- Focus Entertainment
- Released
- May 14, 2019
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