If you've been wondering what's next for Xbox Game Pass on PC, Microsoft has the answer in the form of three new titles heading to the subscription service soon - and they're all good 'uns, taking the form of A Plague Tale: Innocence, Gris, and Children of Morta.

First up is developer Asobo Studios' stealthy third-person action-adventure, A Plague Tale. Released last year to positive reviews, it offers a bleak, but frequently gorgeous, jaunt through 14th century France, as players - in the role of nobleman's daughter Amicia de Rune - attempt to protect sickly younger sibling Hugo from the grip of the Inquisition.

Its stealth might be a little so-so, but the inventive puzzling - often based around manipulating the hordes of diseased rats ravaging the countryside - is much smarter, and considerably more enjoyable. All in all, it's a strong (if sometimes silly) story-driven adventure, with a cast of engaging, wonderfully realised characters and some frequently breathtaking historical sights. It'd frankly be rude not to give it a go when it comes to Game Pass.

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A Plague Tale 2 is reportedly in development.

The rumour comes from XboxSquad, a French website that claims A Plague Tale: Innocence developer Asobo Studio is working on the sequel, which is reportedly set for reveal in 2020, with a target release window of 2022.

When contacted for comment, publisher Focus Home Interactive did not deny the rumour, instead saying it will talk about Asobo's next game "when the right time comes".

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"And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated - fables I had always deemed them - but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?"

Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum.

If you're playing a lot of games, there's no escaping the dusty depths of dungeons. They are everywhere; their twists and turns and nooks and crannies filled with monsters, traps and loot form the spine of countless games.

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Developer Asobo Studio's well-received 14th century "single-player co-op" adventure, A Plague Tale: Innocence, has just launched a free trial version featuring the game's full first chapter - and it's available to download now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.

A Plague Tale, which originally released back in May, follows the frequently bleak journey of Amicia and her sickly 5-year-old brother Hugo, children of a nobleman, forced to flee their castle home to escape the Inquisition. What follows is an enormously atmospheric, if somewhat rough-around-the edges, adventure through fog-shrouded, plague-ridden France.

When Eurogamer contributor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell reviewed A Plague Tale earlier this year, he was critical of the game's frequent dalliances with dull, unrefined stealth. Thankfully, A Plague Tale shines considerably brighter in its environmental puzzling, and that, when combined with its wonderfully rich atmosphere and affectingly well-wrought central relationship, Edwin reckoned, helps it rise above those stodgier elements.

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The Gamesplanet Summer Sale began yesterday with over 1900 titles on offer, plus rolling 24-hour flash deals on recent PC releases and old favourites. But that's not all. As a way to celebrate the occasion, Gamesplanet has kindly provided us with ten games to give away to you lovely Eurogamer readers.

As the Summer Sale has entered its second day, a new selection of flash deals are now live. Right now, that includes the likes of Hitman 2 for 15.99, Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition for 9.75, Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition for 3.70, Dragon Ball FighterZ for 9.99, Metro Redux Bundle for 5.99, XCOM 2 for 8.50, Transport Fever for 5.99, Space Hulk: Tactics for 9.25, For Honor for 9.75 and Motorsport Manager for 5.75.

The majority of these will only be live for a short period of time so make sure you grab anything you're interested in quickly! Continue to check in throughout the rest of the week too as new titles will be reduced every morning at 10am until the end of the sale on 12th August.

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We've scoured the lands looking for some top gaming deals and, shining brightly on the horizon, is this offer on Red Dead Redemption 2 over at Amazon UK.

The swish and stylish edition of Rockstar's western opus comes with a collectible SteelBook and is now only 33.99 on PS4 and Xbox One. A quick look elsewhere shows most standard versions of the game going for around a similar price, so you're getting a nice case for free here!

In fact, if you flick through the site some more, you'll see it's one of the many games on sale ahead of Amazon Prime Day 2019, even though the big bargain event doesn't start until next week.

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How do you tackle one of the most horrific events in the history of Europe in a video game? A Plague Tale: Innocence is set in France in the year 1348 during the beginning of the worst outbreak of the plague, known today as the Black Death, and back in the Late Middle Ages as the Great Mortality. Within just a few years, most of Europe had become decimated by the plague, and many contemporaries believed that the end of the world was at hand. Today, historians estimate that on average around half of Europe's population fell victim to the Black Death.

A Plague Tale isn't shy about bringing us face to face with the inconceivable mass death brought about by the Black Death. Corpses are everywhere, piled up, haphazardly thrown into mass graves or just lying in the middle of the street. If you can stomach a closer inspection, you'll be able to spot the tell-tale black buboes, large swellings in the neck, groin or armpits. These visions are eerily similar to eyewitness accounts of the Black Death, which speak of desolate streets full of death, full cemeteries, and hastily dug pits in which the dead were placed layer upon layer, or, in the words of the contemporary chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, in the manner of a lasagne.

While impressive, apocalyptic visions of mass death are not enough to express the horror and impact of the Black Death on the lives of individuals and communities. How, for example, would one express the omnipresent and constant threat to one's life or the lives of those around you in a game? Reading historical texts, it becomes clear that it wasn't just the lethality of the pestilence that struck terror into peoples' minds, but also its aggressive and unpredictable spread. It was believed that merely looking at or speaking to a sick person could transmit the disease. The Black Death was an entirely invisible enemy that defied any attempts at comprehension or treatment. Today we know that the plague was most likely caused by fleas carried by black rats, but contemporaries attributed its origin to anything from evil vapours brought forth by earthquakes, to an unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter, to Jews poisoning the wells, to God's anger against the wickedness of mankind.

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Asobo Studio deserves kudos for the scale of the achievement delivered in the recently released A Plague Tale: Innocence. Where many smaller studios tap into established engines like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity for their technological needs, this outfit did things the old-fashioned way, developing its own proprietary engine technology. The end result is an absolutely beautiful game and one that scales remarkably well as we climb the console ladder and beyond to the heights of PC's most powerful graphics hardware.

I think what makes A Plague Tale really work from a visual perspective is more than just the core engine technology - though its accomplishments are significant. Combining a linear, story-driven experience with a striking art style and design running on this tech sees all components deliver something greater than the sum of their parts.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a wonderful-looking game from its environments, to its characters, and its effects work. Just the first scene is an absolute treat, revealing a rich post-process pipeline that's reminiscent of Unreal Engine 4 at its most resplendent. There's an embarrassment of riches here, with a beautifully soft volumetric lighting solution, which looks good on all platforms but absolutely shines on PC at its highest settings. Volumetrics don't just come from the sun: lighting piercing fog, suggesting that colour and shadow are drawn from smaller point lights, such as lanterns or torches. It's also impressive to see volumetrics beam through stained glass windows, with the varying colours of the glass illuminating light shards and - impressively - the ground too. It's just one example of an attention to detail that is much appreciated and sometimes overlooked.

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Children struggling to right a world wrecked by the old is a popular theme nowadays, within video games and beyond them. Asobo's often-magnificent A Plague Tale: Innocence is one of the more hopeful variations, pitching a small cast of photogenic youngsters against religious zealots and man-eating rats in medieval France. Though let down by an over-reliance on mandatory stealth, which drains a little of the sorcery from some astounding locations, it is a wonderfully dark and tender fairytale whose key draws are its frail but indefatigable protagonists.

As the curtain goes up, noble-born siblings Amicia and Hugo are chased from their family estate by Inquisition soldiers, leaving their parents for dead. The two are relative strangers to one another: the victim of a hereditary sickness, which slowly blackens his veins over the game's 10 hour story, Hugo has spent his whole life locked away in a loft with his mother, a master alchemist. This affliction is the reason for the Inquisition's raid, and you'll spend much of the plot unravelling its arcane origin. The older Amicia - the character you control for most of the game - has grown up in her father's company and is a spirited creature of the outdoors: when we first meet her, she's learning to hunt with her sling. Their home's destruction throws them together for the first time, much as the death of Faye does Atreus and Kratos in God of War, and as in Santa Monica Studio's game, the story marches to the gentle beat of their growing intimacy.

Hugo is often a source of frustration for Amicia, stuffing his hands gleefully into baskets of putrid fruit in deserted villages, and wailing in panic if she tries to explore without him. But his hard-wearing childishness in the face of incessant horror is also her greatest consolation, the thing anchoring her to herself as she does what is necessary for them both to survive. One of the game's loveliest explorations of this takes the unlikely form of a collectible, where Hugo gathers flowers he recognises from their mother's books, inviting his bedraggled and bloodied sister to stoop so that he can plait them into her hair. The flower stays in Amicia's hair for the rest of the chapter, even as you fell pursuing soldiers with your slingshot or shatter their lanterns to expose them to the rats. It's a gesture that says everything about who Amicia and Hugo are to one another, what they've lost and what they've held onto - and tracking down those blossoms quickly became as important to me as mastering the game's slightly wayward mixture of stealth and terrain puzzles.

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Developer Asobo Studio has offered up eight solid minutes of gameplay footage from its bleakly intriguing "single-player co-op" adventure, A Plague Tale: Innocence - which is coming to PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on May 14th.

A Plague Tale, if you haven't yet been introduced, unfolds across an understandably grim, plague-ridden 14th century France, and follows the harrowing journey of a nobleman's two children - Amicia and her sickly 5-year-old brother Hugo - as they attempt to flee the Inquisition.

That translates to a third-person, narrative-driven adventure - one that attempts to give its miserable world some heart through the central relationship of the two siblings - built around stealth and dual-character puzzling, as players navigate the desolate, fog-shrouded landscape, evading ravenous rat hordes, English soldiers, and the aforementioned Inquisition.

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