Hello and welcome to Platinum Review, a series where we talk about some amazing games, breakdown the roadmap to platinum trophy and I share with you my thoughts on whether you should add another platinum trophy to your collection. This week we will be talking about the latest PS Plus game, A Plague Tale Innocence.

My Thoughts About the Game

So, like you already saw from the intro, this wasn’t my first time finishing the game. Actually, it’s my third time. I finished it once on Steam, got a platinum trophy in PS4 version and now I got a platinum trophy in PS5 version as well, without auto-pop by the way, and there is a good reason for it. I like this game.

Our main protagonist is Amicia, a 14-year-old girl who is forced to go on the journey with her 5-year-old brother Hugo through a plague filled France while being hunted by the Inquisition.

The beauty of the story is that because of her brother’s illness he was mostly cared for by their mother, so in the beginning of the game they are not really familiar with each other and grow closer as the game progresses. Don’t get me wrong, the story is not perfect, not by a long shot. Some characters do make pretty dumb decisions for the sake of moving the story forward and in annoyed me quite a bit. Also, it does take a weird turn, plot-wise, but it’s still pretty fun.

What really helps selling it is the world building and the level design, which I really think is brilliant. You will be traversing through small plague infested towns, country sides and other areas that I really don’t want to spoil, but it does have pretty powerful imagery.

Oh, something to note about level design, it is as linear as it can be, but it works.

I think the gameplay is this game’s strongest side. The main focus is on stealth and environmental puzzles. There is some combat, but you should never try taking on more than one or two enemies at once and it makes a lot of sense, we are playing as a 14-year-old.

Stealth mechanics are pretty fun and I had a blast with them, as I really enjoy those types of games. The down side is that most of the enemies should probably visit an eye doctor and get their peripheral vision checked. Seriously, it’s lucky that the game takes place in 1300s, and those NPCs are not driving around.

Puzzles are mostly simple enough with only a couple of them that require a bit of try and error. Our main enemy in those sections are swarms of disease carrying rats that you have to get through them. You have to use light and your environment, as well as alchemy potions to get through the areas.

As for combat, it’s slow and methodical. Your main weapon is a sling and it takes a few seconds to aim a shot. Also, most of the regular enemies are faster than you, so if you got spotted and there is more than a couple of them you will probably die almost immediately. And you can’t really do a classical stealth takedown, because you are much smaller than your enemies, so if you want to do that, you have to use alchemy potions and they are really pricy. Seriously, I didn’t use stealth take down potion once throughout my playthrough with an exception of the tutorial.

What is the best combat mechanic in my opinion, is using the rats to your advantage. You pretty much use the environment to send swarms of rats to eat your enemies. Pretty brutal stuff.

What I honestly didn’t like as much is the fact that in some scenarios there is realistically only one right approach. You would be introduced to a new mechanic in the beginning of the level and pretty much forced to use throughout the section. It’s fine, but it takes away the creativity, something that kind of bothered me.

From the technical perspective, does the PS5 version look drastically different from PS4 version? Not really, other that performance enhancements and light adaptive triggers usage I didn’t really notice much difference, so honestly replaying it just for the visuals is not really worth it, but it does look pretty good. I would recommend turning chromatic aberration off though, without it the game looks better in my opinion, especially if you play in 4K.

Oh, also, you need to be careful with check points, you can exploit them to your advantage by just sprinting through some sections, but if you mess it up you can find yourself stuck in a death loop. It happened to me on my previous playthrough and I had to restart the whole chapter. Not the end of the world though.

Overall, if you like stealth it would be a pretty solid game to play.

Roadmap & Trophy List

As for the platinum trophy, it’s really straight forward. All you need to do is complete all the 17 chapters, find all the collectibles, do a couple of miscellaneous chapter specific trophies and upgrade your equipment to the maximum.

What is nice is that you have chapter select, so even if you missed something you can always go back and clean it up. Also, when you pick up a collectible the game saves immediately, so you can back out right after picking it up. I actually used this trick quite a bit. There are a couple of areas that require you to kill an enemy or use resources to get to collectibles. I would just run, grab it and restart check point, made my life a lot easier.

I usually advice not to use a guide on your first playthrough, but in this game it’s really not that bad, because the collectibles count is really reasonable, there is only 50, and you will probably find most of them naturally anyway.

Also, they are not as boring like in most games, because they actually add lines of dialogue and world building and sometimes surrounded by other useful resources, so you are not wasting your time by collecting them.

Chapter specific trophies are extremely easy, most of them are for simply interacting with objects or doing a specific task.

The only exception is one trophy that requires you to follow a character into a room before he reaches it without being detected, and even that is easily doable by trial and error and consulting a guide.

I think the only two trophies you need to keep an eye out for is for upgrading your sling and your equipment to the maximum. They are technically semi-missable.

The reason for it is that they do require resources. I focused heavily on looting and upgrading carrying capacity first, because otherwise you will have to leave a lot of things behind. Also, keep in mind that some of the alchemy potions do require the same materials, so I do encourage you to be mindful of where you use them.

After upgrading carrying capacity to the max honestly it became a breeze and I got both trophies in a single playthrough in chapter 15, so it’s definitely doable if you are conservative with your resources.

If you finished the game and you still don’t have enough, you’ll probably have to replay a couple of chapters and focus on the equipment you didn’t finish upgrading the first time around. For that reason, I would recommend focusing on one upgrade path at a time if possible.

By the way, if you already have a platinum trophy in PS4 version you can download your save and all the trophies will pop, although I did hear that it was a bit of a hit and miss for some people, maybe it will be sorted by the time this article is published. Regardless, this is not something I personally did, so I can’t really talk about it too much, other than it exists.

It took me about 12 hours to get this platinum trophy, and I actually did it in one sitting, because I am such a mad-lad. In all seriousness, it’s because I was familiar with the game and its mechanics, so it might take you a bit longer, but in its core, it is a reasonably easy platinum trophy.

Conclusions

So, should you platinum A Plague Tale Innocence?

If you like stealth games and don’t mind a quirky story, then for sure, it’s very decent and has straight forward platinum trophy, so if you decide to play it, you might as well add another platinum trophy to your collection.