YMMV / A Plague Tale: Innocence

• Adorkable: Lucas, apprentice to the Alchemist Laurentius, is a chess-playing, smart kid who gets excited at new discoveries, can nearly always been seen reading a book, and provides the team with all the intelligence necessary during their quests.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The lethality of slings is often downplayed in the modern day, so some players such as the hosts of the Short Games podcast have claimed Amicia's ability to kill is impossible.
• Awesome Music: The trailer's rendition of "Run For Cover" is melancholic and represents Amicia and Hugo's life on the run and how they must work together to survive.
• Complete Monster: In a series where The Black Death runs rampant, these two are far worse than the rats:
  • Vitalis Benevent is the Grand Inquisitor with the intent of acquiring the Macula to conquer the world. Believing himself as almighty, Vitalis had his forces hunt Hugo de Rune to acquire his blood and perfect it, to acquire the power of the plague and to prolong his own life. To that end, he had many people killed and tortured, including Rodric's father after they became of no more use to him, with Beatrice de Rune kept and tortured to gain her knowledge of the Macula. Once he managed to get the Macula after sacrificing legions of his own men, Vitalis tried to tie up all loose ends by corrupting Hugo to become his follower and get him to kill Amicia. When Amicia and Hugo confront Vitalis into the headquarters of the Inquisition to stop him, Vitalis revealed that he managed to breed numerous rats under his own control and intend to use it take over all of Europe, believing he himself is humanity's savior, sacrificing an entire congregation to his powers. Power-hungry and ruthless, Vitalis plunged the world to a dark era of the plague to reach absolute power.
  • Sir Nicholas is a knight who butchered countless people in the mission given to him by Vitalis. In charge of capturing Hugo de Rune, Nicholas led the massacre of the de Rune household, killing even the helpless servants and torturing Beatrice, the matriarch of the de Rune family. When the plague began to rise, Nicholas headed the Inquisition to kill countless villagers, even those who weren't infected, and abandoned many of his own men to the mercy of the plague, silently enjoying the slaughter. Once the Inquisition was able to grab hold of Hugo, Nicholas had his own men sacrificed to overtax Hugo's power to keep him in check and strengthen Vitalis's own power. With Hugo at his side, he accompanies him to attack Château d'Ombrage and tries to coerce him to murder Amicia with his rats. When Hugo resisted, Nicholas takes a hands-on approach, killing Arthur before trying to kill Amicia personally.
• Evil Is Cool: Sir Nicholas due to him being a badass knight dressed in slick black armor. One has to admit that lighting himself on fire in order to fight Hugo's rats is quite impressive, if completely deranged.
• Funny Moments: In the first chapter, a pair of servants discus troubling local events. One brings up "bites" in the night, the other says it's probably English trickery, and the first asks "The English are biting people?"
• Goddamned Bats: The archers/spear throwers in the later levels. They go down just as quickly as any of the other knights, but they will instantly kill you while you're trying to deal with something else.
• Love to Hate: Vitalis Benevent is one of the most despicable villains in a video game and he so memorable because of this. Fans are even calling him Emperor Palpatine of the Dark Ages, in terms of his similar power-hungry and sadistic nature.
• Narm:
  • The sequence where Amicia and Hugo have to escape from their home while seeing enemy soldiers killing and brutalising their friends is meant to be harrowing, but the effect is somewhat spoiled by the oddly obliging way that enemies keep turning their backs to the only path through the house and then just standing there, apparently so fascinated by the decor that they don't notice a pair of kids walking past two steps away from them. It's partly justified in how the sequence amounts to a stealth tutorial but could have been pulled off less obviously.
  • The first time Amicia upgrades her sling, there's a cutscene where she whirls it a bit. The model and animation used in gameplay is recycled, but they're really not meant for up close, and what seems naturalistic at the usual distance and angle strobes stiffly here.
  • In the back half of the game, the rats learn a new trick - they "regroup" as the game calls it and turn into churning rat tornadoes that slowly drift towards you that you must disperse with Ignifier. It's extremely silly in a game that is otherwise as serious as it can be.
    • Doubles up a bit with Gameplay and Story Segregation or The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard - while "vortexing" like this, the rats are able to approach and extinguish light sources, and will do so with impunity any time they have the chance. During the final part of the game, Hugo's controlled rats can be directed to vortex in the same way, but the player-controlled rats are completely stumped by light sources.
  • Amicia being a One-Hit-Point Wonder is logical 99% of the time, considering her enemies are men with swords, shields and sometimes full plate armor. Not so logical when she goes down in one tap to the gaunt Inquisitions alchemists, who look about 90 pounds soaking wet.
  • In general, the fact that the French army is getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of teenagers, armed with nothing but slings and their own fists, may make one chuckle.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Of all things to Disworld's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. The Rat Plague acts exactly like the rat king's army in the book, seething, rolling, yet recoiling from fire. The plague follows his plan to destroy the world of men.
• That One Boss: The final boss fight. Firstly, figuring out what to do can take a few tries. Stepping on the white rats will instantly kill you, unlike other sections of the game where you're given a window of time to get to safety. You can get trapped if you mess up your timing or positioning, meaning you'll be unable to dodge the next attack and you'll have to start all over again. Even if you don't trap yourself, you can still end up wasting a round because the rats aren't where they're supposed to be.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Arthur is critically underused. He is in the background in the first chapter he appears, gets captured, then gets rescued only to be left behind in the base. The first chapter where he gets any real screentime is the chapter where he dies.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Amicia reacts with horror to her first kill, and the game seems to be setting up a fairly realistic depiction of how killing can profoundly change someone, especially if they're only a child and even if it may be justified. However, while Amicia does become less averse to using lethal force as the game progresses and even gets called out by Melie for her excessive use of the sling, her personality doesn't otherwise change much, nor does this ever really affect the story.
  • Some of this may also be due to the fact that there's actually several times in-game (at least twice, so unfortunately few chances) that Amicia may choose to save someone, or leave them to be devoured by the rats while helpless to whatever choice she decides upon, which ultimately leaves Amicia's attitude towards other lives up to interpretation by the player based on the choices they make in-game. Letting them die to the rat swarms would denote a callous and uncaring Amicia, while saving the English would show she's not willing to kill helpless men and will only use lethal force if she has to.