Inverse - 🐀 300,000 plague-ridden rats

Tuesday

Oct 18 2022

“Aw, rats!” is a phrase you will utter dozens of times as you play A Plague Tale: Requiem, an action-adventure stealth game that’s a sequel to 2019’s A Plague Tale: Innocence. In addition to contending with a horde of up to 300,000 plague-ridden rats on the regular, as Amicia de Rune you must also protect your cursed brother Hugo from soldiers of the French Inquisition in 14th-century Aquitaine, France.

Requiem takes place during the peak of the Hundred Years’ War amidst a horrid outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. And while Amicia must rely mostly on her stealth skills to lead her brother on a desperate pirate-filled adventure to cure his supernatural curse, she also wields a crossbow to lean more into action.

While the game boasts even more stunning visuals than its predecessor, repetitive environmental puzzles and a padded runtime sour an otherwise excellent experience.

What's New

Review

Gaming

A Plague Tale: Requiem can't overcome slow pacing

The bucolic brick-laden town that had been my home for all of 24 hours was suddenly consumed by a tidal wave of swimming flesh.

One moment, innocent merchants peddled their wares at the market, and the next, they shrieked in horror as buildings collapsed under the weight of a massive rat swarm. All I could do was run until the shrieks and the sounds of several thousand rats crashing through a town crescendoed before fading into silence. Then the whimpering of the poor souls left alive began.

Life in A Plague Tale: Requiem is hard. Death follows protagonist Amicia wherever she does. Developer Asobo Studio’s follow-up to 2019’s A Plague: Tale Innocence is a beautiful horror to behold. It does not reinvent the wheel of third-person stealth action games but it does deliver a well-crafted entry for the genre.

While the story itself is highlighted by wonderful performances for the lead siblings Hugo and Amica, the full package is an overambitious — and overstuffed — attempt to deliver a much longer experience.

Read our review

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See important Reg A disclosures.

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Superhero Issue

Mind and Body

How one Chernobyl survivor is using “Superhero Therapy” to help Ukrainians today

Janina Scarlet’s origin story begins in Vinnytsia, Ukraine.

When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, Scarlet was 3 years old. She and her family were exposed to radiation, and she spent much of her childhood in and out of hospitals. She still gets sick in response to changes in the weather and associates with Storm, the X-Men hero with the power to control the atmosphere.

All four of Scarlet’s grandparents were also Holocaust survivors, and she recalls growing up surrounded by evidence of the tragedy. “You couldn’t go anywhere in the city without there being some kind of a memory or a memorial for someone who was a survivor.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, her family applied for refugee status and immigrated to the United States. It was there, at age 16, that she saw X-Men.

“When I saw the first X-Men movie, I realized we could understand each other’s pain through fiction,” Scarlet says. “I could relate to Magneto because of his experience in surviving the Holocaust and his family not surviving. And then, seeing the X-Men being persecuted for being different, I could relate to that. I saw that we could use stories to help people process trauma.”

That realization spurred Scarlet to take her first psychology class, train as a clinical psychologist, and eventually develop Superhero Therapy, a practice that combines fictional characters with tried-and-true therapeutic frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy.

Inverse Interview

Entertainment

House of the Dragon's Graham McTavish makes franchise acting an art

“Character actor” is often a four-letter word in Hollywood, but Graham McTavish embraces it.

“I would say I’m a character actor,” the actor known for The Hobbit Trilogy, Outlander, and now, House of the Dragon tells Inverse.

“Leading actors are a strange kind of breed in a way. They're heroes, a lot of them. And I don't play many heroes. I play villains, anti-heroes, complicated individuals, whatever you like to call them. But I like that, I find that enjoyable.”

McTavish’s latest “complicated individual” is Ser Harrold Westerling, a veteran member of the Kingsguard. To McTavish, the steadfastness of Harrold is just one more acting muscle he gets to stretch in a very diverse body of work. He might not be the star, but Westerling is a moral rock in the murky waters of Westeros power struggles.

THE B.O.A.T.

Science

"Brightest of all time" gamma-ray burst jolts astronomers into high gear

A powerful flash of radiation from a dying star sent astronomers into a flurry of fast-paced activity last week, as they raced to gather data on the explosion’s afterglow.

This image, made from data processed from the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, captured the fading glow of the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, which will shine a bright light on some of the most mysterious phenomena in our universe.

Take a closer look

CHECK, PLEASE!

Science

Should you store coffee in the freezer? A chemist explains the storage hack

How to store food is a surprisingly contentious subject. Ask your mom, and then ask your friend: Do apples go in the fridge or on the counter? What about tomatoes? Where do you keep the butter? Chances are that each will give you a different answer — perhaps even opposing answers.

These foods are perishable, but some insist on keeping them on the counter — the reasons can be cultural, but they could also be borne out of scientific understanding. Coffee grounds have a stable quality that makes the stuff feel like a room-temperature situation; they are sold to you as such, anyways. That means they should be able to reside either on the counter or in the pantry (but tell this to peanut butter fridge evangelists).

For some, the only way to store coffee is in the freezer. One of my earliest memories is of my parents tendering Zabar’s coffee to and from the freezer every morning, as they still do now.

Brianne Linne, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has investigated the chemistry of coffee mouthfeel, says that in the lab, her team kept beans chilled. So does that mean everyone should put their beans next to the ice cream?

Learn more

Anniversary

Science

65 years ago, astronomy's most colorful character made a bold interplanetary claim

In the late 1950s, there was a nontrivial global effort, a race in fact, to be the first nation to send an object to Earth’s orbit. Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, was launched 65 years ago on October 4, 1957. It was a first heard that made headlines around the world.

But the first object of human origin to enter the Sun’s orbit was considerably more obscure — if the test, indeed, worked. The man who purportedly came up with the original idea for the experiment was also the man who first theorized dark matter and neutron stars, eccentric astronomer Fritz Zwicky.

Sixty-five years ago, Zwicky performed an unconventional experiment that potentially saw two small “artificial meteors” leave the confines of Earth’s orbit for the first time.

Meanwhile...

Maserati’s first electric sports car goes all in on performance

A plant scientist’s guide to keeping your jack-o’-lantern from rotting before Halloween

The future of Discord is a little bit Jackbox and a little bit Star Trek

'Rings of Power' star teases “a new character” in season 2

Today in history: American gangster Al Capone was convicted of federal income-tax evasion and was subsequently sentenced to 11 years in prison October 18, 1931.

Song of the day: "Rats, we're rats; we're the rats"

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