A Plague Tale: Innocence: Representing Portions of Late Medival French History
A Plague Tale: Innocence follows the journey of a young girl named Amicia trying to save her little brother Hugo from a genetic illness; set in Aquitaine, France from 1348 to 1349, the siblings are right in the middle of three major historical events: the Black Plague, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Medival Inquisition. All of these heavily impact the game’s narrative, some in more obvious ways than others. Because of how overarching and interwoven the Inquisition is to major plot points and to keep some focus, I will limit this writing’s focus on the Black Death and Hundred Years’ War in relation to A Plague Tale: Innocence.
The Black Plague is present throughout the entire game. The first location the characters travel to is a small village that has been devastated by the plague. Entire major sections are cautiously quarantined and uninhabited by the villagers. The townspeople are willing to do anything to get rid of the plague, including finding children responsible for the sickness and killing them in retribution. The desperation and confusion of a small French town facing the plague make sense historically; 1347 was the year the Black Plague was just starting to gain traction, so basically there isn’t any popular knowledge or medical understanding of what is killing masses of people. In such times, considering the hysteria such an epidemic can cause, a town taking that crazed urgency for the plague to stop a step further and finding children responsible is not too outlandish. Outside of this town, the game also shows how livestock were killed in mass by the plague, not just killing human beings. Even if larger animals and people weren’t directly infected, the food chain and inevitability of small rodents and mammals becoming infected ensured that nobody was really capable of being unaffected by the Black Plague.
The most creative presentation of the Black Death is in the neverending sea of rats in this game. The most commonly accepted theory of how the plague spread is that fleas living on black rats carried the sickness. In A Plague Tale, the rats are one of the enemies that can kill you, and they’re in such incomprehensibly massive hordes that it can be overwhelming to see and hear so many rats. These rats are a physical stand-in for the magnitude of the Black Plague. Also in regards to their aggressiveness, the plague is symbolized by the magnitude and ferocity of the black rats. Facing thousands upon thousands at multiple points in the game, these rats, just like the plague, are virtually inescapable; they both eventually reach whatever safe area the characters ever think might be able to protect them from the rodents. The black rats do a tactful job making every location’s security unreliable and keeping players on edge.
The start of the Hundred Years’ War is prevalent when the characters travel across a battleground littered with dead soldiers and when they escape from the English Army’s forces. The reclaiming of Aquitaine by the French, from the English, is largely seen as a major trigger to this war; therefore, this location seeing such dramatic battle when still relatively near the beginning of the Hundred Years’ war makes sense. Weapons like the trebuchet were still used at the time. The most notable connotation to history is probably the looting of the dead. For most of recorded history, the dead left behind from warfare got searched through for supplies and valuables; often, such looters would be the enemy. Amicia is just searching for supplies she uses mostly for distractions and defending against rats, but English Army soldiers are also loitering around the battlefield in a search for anything of value.
The developers of A Plague Tale: Innocence took a ton of time to research and build such an accurate and artful environment. The amount of detail just in the world-building alone makes it clear that this game isn’t justs arbitrarily set in 14th century France. The location and era have a lot of historical notability, and the design of this game fully incorporated that history into the game.
