How the A Plague Tale: Innocence creates horror without jump scares – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader reviews surprise hit A Plague Tale: Innocence and marvel’s at the atypical way it creates both tension and sympathy for its characters.

Since having my own children, I have noticed I have developed a fairly deep aversion to other people’s. Whereas previously there was a certain level of accepting tolerance, now at the school gates the precocious little rascals seem to irritate me far more than they deserve to. Add in a French accent and make the children noble-born, and you can start to understand that I went into A Plague Tale: Innocence with a certain level of prejudice that made me feel I was probably going to hate the game.

To my surprise then, the game deftly builds a relationship between its protagonists that is immediately engaging, and ultimately builds a very memorable adventure that already has me looking forward to the sequel later this year.

I play games late at night, once the family have all gone to bed, so it doesn’t take much boredom to have me drifting off to sleep. As noted, as I was certain I would be turning the game off swiftly, and when the game opens with you, in the shoes of young Amicia De Rune, who is roughly teenager years old, walking the dog with your dad through a forest, and throwing some rocks at a tree by way of a tutorial, I was sure the game’s opening was going to confirm I was wasting my time. How wrong I was. The situation for Amicia and her family very quickly turns bloody, as it turns out the Inquisition sometimes skip the questions and get straight on with the nasty work of laying waste to an entire household, without even so much as a ‘how do you do’.

This opening chapter sets the tone for the rest of the game. Amicia needs to collect her five-year-old brother Hugo and escape