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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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