I love you
But when you're gone
There'll be Nothing else
I'll be all alone
All alone

It's more Plague Tale!.. for better or for worse. I might as well start off with what makes it good, and there's defintiely some weight there. Plague Tale: Requiem is a whole lot more "serious" than its predecessor in that its a darker and more depraved game, which in theory doesn't make any media "better" but with a topic as traumatically heavy as the Black Plague, I think is necessary. Requiem doesn't shy away from death in its most cruel and encroaching forms. Characters close to Amicia and Hugo will perish, entire populations will vanish, and the two constantly weigh the consequences of their actions and quest to right the proverbial ship. The game doesn't only do this through the story, but with the backgrounds and environments that the two travel through. After spending much of the first game in Guyenne, the growing party spend much of Requiem in transit. While many of these locations are luscious at first, thanks to some amazing environmental work by Asobo, they quickly descend into dilapidated warzones dripping with plague-borne ooze and despair. I think this allowed me to get more emotionally invested in the game than its predecessor, I found myself groaning less at the dialogue/conversations because I was consistently grossed out by what I was looking at, which is a good thing. Overall I think characters were written much better; Hugo was way less annoying than in the first game, Lucas was actually fun to be around, Arnaud plays a good guardian, and Amicia leans in to the derangement necessary to defeat the evil at hand. While I'm not a fan of Amicia's voice actress, the writing of her character made her a very compelling sibling protagonist.

The story was also quite good in Requiem, though I don't think it (nor Ragnarok) should have been nominated for this at the game awards. Ultimately the themes don't get too deep, other than trying to find a cure for Hugo and defeating the Plague Rat issue, but The Last of Us didn't get too deep either outside of being a story more about humans against humans. I'm not trying to compare the two, because The Last of Us 1 is nearly a flawless game, but I think the commonality in a worldwide destructive illness and how humans react to it tie the two's stories, rather than being more philosophical. Plague Tale 2's narrative jumps around a bit and has some fairly obvious twists, but I found it compelling enough to see it all the way through the end, because it was satiating enough and the writing of characters made me kind of want to see their resolutions.

Now it may read that I was more favorable on the game than I was with Innocence, which is true to a point but there were a number of things not improved from first title to sequel. The first being the combat, it's still really bad... it's samey and motonous and any fighting involving the sling and crossbow take waaaaaaaay too long. If you're being attacked by multiple characters, it's effectively just a kite simulator in which you have to find an impediment to enemy movement, run five steps away, throw a sling, run five steps away, repeat. Even though you can upgrade the sling motion (which was hard because the game doesn't regularily give you enough resources to do this,) it's not enough to give you any flow to fighting. Amicia still has to rev it up and watch as the enemies run a little too fast at her, often times requiring other ammo types to defeat. This was also annoying, and ultimately was my problem with Scarlet Nexus (I bet you didn't think I'd include that here.) In Requiem, much like Scarlet Nexus, the player is given a ton of tools for defeating the enemies. But this is a guise to hide enemy variety, because just like with SN each of these concoctions made by Lucas are used for a certain enemy type. This means that the player doesn't really have agency to how they want to fight (which is key in gaming) but just has to match the type of alchemical item to whatever enemy is running at them, that got annoying and always will in games.

Another issue I had with Requiem, that I also had recently with GoW: Ragnarok, is the just constant puzzling for absolutely no reason. I'm staunchly anti-puzzle, but I can excuse it in games like Resident Evil or Zelda where they make it flow well enough with the game or encourage the player to succeed through self-discovery. Requiem's puzzles are just there... they're not hard, they're not fun, they're just there, and are EVERYWHERE. You're rarely given a hint, and the obnoxiousness of the puzzles being there just to pack in gametime only frustrated me throughout the narratively intense moments in the story.

Requiem was also rather buggy with enemy movement, often times if you were about to exit an area after sneaking through a plethora of guards and had alerted just one, they would teleport through a wall and stop you. I get that the devs wanted you to "sneak the right way" by either taking out all the guards or getting through undetected, but it got annoying how often I was penalized from reaching the objective while an alarm was raised. Maybe there's a "git gud" here but I found it far more annoying than not.

While A Plague Tale: Requiem is exactly what I was looking for Innocence's sequel narratively speaking, the constant puzzling for the sake of puzzling and lack of improvement to combat is not enough to warrant a higher rating. I wouldn't recommend Plague Tale as a series, but if you want a story taking place in a unique period in gaming (The Hundred Years War/Black Plague,) maybe you should start the under twenty hour A Plague Tale: Requiem