Gloriously grim stealth game A Plague Tale: Innocence - you know, that game with the rats - is currently free to keep over on the Epic Games Store. If you’ve somehow missed it before now, it’s well worth playing in my opinion - especially for the low price of nothing.
]]>Asobo Studio - the Bordeaux-based developer behind the extremely different Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and A Plague Tale: Innocence - are working on something "new" and "major" with Plague Tale publisher Focus Entertainment, according to a release portfolio update sent to investors this week.
]]>The dark gods of survival horror smile on you this day, child. Resident Evil Village is out now, beckoning you into its township like a big church bell. But wait, before you go tip-toeing through the disturbing cabbage patches of these zombievamp wolfpeople, or whatever they are, please come this way. I have a map for you. An itinerary of other small settlements. Here are the 8 creepiest villages in PC games.
]]>Xbox Game Pass for PC continues to be a pretty excellent deal for those not averse to subscription services. Microsoft have been adding new games to the catalog on the regular and you can still grab your first three months for £1/$1. Microsoft announced three more games coming over the next few weeks, making the deal better as usual.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>Oh, the rats. The rats and the rats. If you don’t like rats, it’s best you don’t read on, because in A Plague Tale: Innocence there are thousands of them. They’re the stars of its grim medieval show, swarming around you, chittering and lunging and responding to your every movement.
And they presented their creators at developer Asobo Studio all kinds of problems to make. Their every little detail is the result of lots of experimentation and many wrong turns as their programmers and designers laboured to both make them feel horribly alive, while also building a game around them. After all, no one had tried before to make a game about surviving throngs of vicious rodents during the Black Death. Merry Christmas, Mechanic readers!
]]>That One Game With The Brilliant Rats, aka A Plague Tale: Innocence, now has a demo so we can all admire the rats. And maybe be drawn into the story of kiddywinkles sneaking through France during the Black Death, pursued by the Inquisition and surrounded by ravenous rats. Even our Alice Bee, who is known to feel nothing for the awful digikids we're forced to babysit thanks to the ongoing daddification of video games, grew fond of A Plague Tale's dear child when she played it for review. Me, I will confess I played the demo mostly to see rats.
]]>Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring's hangover. It's the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not "mojito time", Geoff, put those away. It's time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It's unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space 'splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).
Okay, Geoff, now bring the mojitos.
]]>Hello person. This is the Steam Charts, the weekly round-up of the top-grossing PC games on the online store Steam. We write it cynically to collect your clicks, and then we take those clicks and we use them to poke innocent orphans in their stupid orphan eyes.
]]>Our former John (RPS in peace) has vanished in odd circumstances, last heard claiming he'll be flying through the sky in a big metal snake, so I'm taking over this week. Not even an employee anymore and he's still making work for me.
Join me for a stroll down the hit parade to inspect last week's top-selling games on Steam.
]]>I am famously not a fan of children in video games, because I think they mostly dead-eyed haunted dolls that are used as cheap, empty receptacles for player empathy. I don’t even like Clementine in The Walking Dead. Yes, I am a monster, etc.
I tell you this so you understand how cute Hugo in A Plague Tale: Innocence must be for me to love him. He is a little stampy only-just-not-a-toddler bundle of wonder. I want to pick him up and pinch his little cheeks.
]]>The historical horrors of Black Death 'em up A Plague Tale: Innocence will swarm onto PC on May 14th, publishers Focus Home Interactive announced today. That One Game With The Brilliant Rats, as our former Adam (RPS in peace) nicknamed it, is a stealth-o-story about kiddywinkles creeping across medieval France while evading bad humans and worse rats. Oh, the rats! Those ravenous rats. Scurrying, burrowing into flesh, devouring. They flow like a terrible torrent of teeth and I'll certainly pay good money to see that myself.
]]>If you like seeing swarms of rats burst out of pulsating corpses and devour men alive, boy howdy do I have the video for you. Sixteen minutes of sneaking, puzzling, and murdering-by-rat from A Plague Tale: Innocence are yours to watch in a gameplay video creeping out of Gamescom today. Y'know, that's the stealth puzzler about kids travelling across 14th Century France through war and the Black Death, the game our former Adam (RPS in peace) said "will almost certainly be That One Game With The Brilliant Rats". They are indeed brilliant rats, flowing like a river made of teeth. Come see!
]]>Leave no rodent behind – that’s the motto of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. With the release of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, we decided to celebrate the lovable dirtbag of videogames. The lowly, filthy, wonderful rat. Whether you are murdering five of them in cold blood for an RPG hotel owner, or pledging your sword to a disgusting subterranean monarch, there’s room in your heart for the humble rat.
And your intestine. And lung. Basically, shove over, organs. Make room for the rats.
]]>"[It] will almost certainly be That One Game With The Brilliant Rats," our Adam declared after seeing a bit of A Plague Tale: Innocence [official site] earlier this year. It's a stealth game set in France in 1349, when the Black Death is in full swing and swarms of rats are feasting on corpses. Two kiddywinkles are our stealth heroes, trying to dodge both the ravenous horde and the Inquisition, using light to protect themselves from the rats and taking light from their foes to feed 'em to the squeakers. Nasty. Now we can see those rats for ourselves, as the game's first trailer has arrived out of E3:
]]>It's a strange thing to be known for, but A Plague Tale: Innocence [official site] will almost certainly be That One Game With The Brilliant Rats. As soon as footage starts to spread around the internet, it's the rats that people will settle on because they are the entire point of the exercise. With all apologies to the two kids who are the actual protagonists, sneaking through a plague-ridden medieval French city and avoiding both inquisitors and rats, it's the swarms that steal the show. Both as a game mechanic and a technical feat, the rats are king. It makes Dishonored look like a petting zoo.
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