Try A Plague Tale: Innocence for free with its new demo

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You too can experience the joys of *checks notes* hiding from deadly plague rats

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a hard sell, but now that it's got a free demo on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, you can see for yourself why it's racked up so many reviews calling it heartbreaking and compelling, if a bit uneven. You can find the demo on Steam, Xbox Live, or the PlayStation Store, and if you like what you see, you'll be able to get the full game at its lowest price ever this weekend. 

A Plague Tale is a stealth-puzzle game about two siblings, Amicia and Hugo, who're on the run in a plague-stricken feudal France. The actual gameplay consists mostly of hiding from and guards and rats - or, failing that, distracting or disabling them. It's a game driven by its characters, and its mechanics don't really ramp up until the second half, so it may still be difficult to get a sense of things from its limited demo, which only includes the first of a whopping 17 chapters. But as we said in our A Plague Tale: Innocence review, it's worth getting invested. 

"Hugo’s mannerisms are childish in all the right ways: he asks simple questions about dead bodies, skips along with frogs, gets distracted by fruit, just wants to see his mummy," our review reads. "It all makes you realise how strange the world of A Plague Tale: Innocence is, with unobtrusive regular exposition from soldiers that keeps you up to speed on the story, all set in a phenomenally beautiful (yet horrific) world. The eerie combination of all that lets A Plague Tale: Innocence retain its tense horror factor, with stealth sections leaving you carefully planning out whether it’s better to kill enemies and risk detection, or simply let them be."   

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Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.