A Plague Tale: Requiem carries a young woman and her brother Hugo across a plague-ridden landscape on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The rats have returned. So has the weight of every choice the girl makes to keep Hugo alive.
Trailer, via Focus Entertainment.
The Girl and Her Brother Head South
The game picks up after the events of the first chapter in the series, sending the siblings south in search of a cure for Hugo’s strange condition. The journey moves through sunlit fields, walled towns, and finally into ruin, and the change in setting gives the game room to breathe between its darker stretches.
Combat has grown since the last outing. The older sister now carries more tools than her old sling, and the game lets players choose between stealth and open fighting more often than before. Some stretches let a player creep past every guard without being seen at all, while others push her into open combat whether she wants it or not.
The middle section of the game leans harder into these choices than the opening chapters do. Guards patrol wider areas, and the tools at hand — fire, sling shots, alchemical mixtures — give a player more than one way through a locked gate or a guarded courtyard.
Hugo’s Condition Drives the Story
Hugo remains the center of the story. His illness, tied to the swarms of rats that flood entire sequences, forces his sister into decisions that cost her something each time. The bond between the two siblings is the clearest thread running through the game, and it holds up across the full length of the campaign.
Here is what stands out most across the journey:
- The bond between the two siblings
- The scale of the rat swarms, larger than anything in the first game
- The variety of tools available in combat
- The shift from quiet stealth sections to loud, chaotic set pieces
- The pacing of the middle stretch, which slows in a few chapters
That slower stretch in the middle of the game is the one place the pacing suffers.
The Rats Return, Bigger Than Before
The rat swarms are the game’s signature set piece, and Requiem pushes them further than the original did. Entire towns collapse under the weight of them, and some sequences turn the swarms into a moving wall that changes the path forward as it surges across the screen.
The game is dense with detail from one end to the other. Light falls across stone and water in a way that holds up well on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and the PC version scales for players who want to push the settings further still. Ash drifts through burned villages, and the rats themselves move as one body rather than a collection of separate creatures, which makes the biggest swarms feel like a genuine threat rather than a simple obstacle.
Sound design plays a large part in selling these moments too. The scratch and chatter of the rats fills every quiet pause between lines of dialogue, so that even the calm stretches of a level carry a low sense of danger underneath them.
Where the Chapters Slow
Not every chapter matches the highs of the rat sequences or the quieter character moments. A handful of chapters in the middle stretch add length to the story without adding much to the combat variety already set up earlier in the game.
The voice work carries the weight in these slower stretches. The lead actor gives her character exhaustion and resolve in equal measure, and Hugo’s performance keeps him easy to care for even in his most difficult moments. Their conversations, quiet asides about their mother or their old home, do more to hold a player’s attention in these chapters than the level design does on its own.
Later chapters bring the pace back up, and the closing hours of A Plague Tale: Requiem return to the scale and tension of its best sequences. The final stretch pulls together the tools, the swarms, and the relationship between brother and sister into a set of levels that rank among the strongest in the whole game.
Key Facts
– Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
– Score: 8.3 out of 10
– Sequel to the original A Plague Tale game
– Central characters: two siblings, a young woman and her brother Hugo
A Plague Tale: Requiem builds on what came before it, and it raises the stakes for its two leads even where the middle chapters slow the pace. The combat variety, the scale of the rat sequences, and the strength of the bond between brother and sister carry it through a stretch that occasionally loses some of its early momentum. Score: 8.3 of 10.
