We’re playing this game for a future edition of Historians React to Video Games — our video series that explores video game with our colleagues. A Plague’s Tale has garnered almost exclusively positive press, and fantastic user reviews (e.g. 9/10 on Steam, 8.6 Metacritic user score). That reception is curious to me, and I wonder what game these reviewers are playing? While the environments of the game are beautifully rendered and the historical setting is interesting, everything else about this game is frustratingly thin. Reviewers rave about its narrative which so far is rather flat and fairly one dimensional. The plague setting could have been interesting, but it’s so overwrought (especially the role of rats) as to be made hilarious rather than horrific. The Inquisition is less formidable an enemy than Mel Brooks version in “The History of the World Part II.” Rats are afraid of candle and torchlight? Villagers who are facing an insurmountable epidemic concern themselves with attacking desperate children, why? Stealth means simply walking past a potential enemy when they turn their back to the player and the chase mechanics are frustratingly linear lacking any real stakes in the narrative. There will be much more to say as we move forward in the game and discuss it with our Medievalist colleague in the next week, but at this point the game doesn’t seem worthy of the positive attention it has received.