A Plague Tale Requiem is a great new addition to the action-adventure-survival genre. The game is focused on exploration, using a mix of stealth and puzzle-solving. There's also some combat elements, but you'll do best if you avoid fighting. As the game opens up you gain additional capabilities that let you light and extinguish fire from a distance, and there's also new weapons. During your journey you will meet lots of interesting characters and that's an important part of the experience. It's very easy to sympathize with the main protagonists and the NPCs you encounter, thanks to good storytelling, solid acting and top-notch voice acting.

In terms of graphics, A Plague Tale Requiem looks very good for a title in 2022. Especially the characters are rendered with such detail and fidelity they almost seem lifelike. Considering that Asobo is an AA game studio and doesn't have nearly as many resources as Ubisoft or EA, this is a fantastic achievement. I also have to applaud them for using their own engine and not making this yet another Unreal Engine 4 title.

Textures are rich and crisp, even when you walk up right to them. The same is true for most environments, especially the foliage is very well done and used for good effect. Given the medieval setting, it is expected that there is only very little "flat" terrain; the map artists definitely did a good job here, building uneven terrain that looks very realistic. Of course "more" is always better, and there's often locations where sprinkling on some additional geometry and texture details would have been nice, but given the budget constraints and the large number of platforms this game is shipping on, it's understandable that Asobo didn't go all out.

What also matters here is the in-game performance. A Plague Tale Requiem is a very demanding title in terms of hardware requirements. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a Radeon RX 5700 XT, 6700 XT, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2080 or RTX 3060 Ti. For the more demanding 1440p resolution only the Radeon RX 6800 and higher are sufficient, or the NVIDIA RTX 3070 and faster. If you want 4K60, then only the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 can achieve fluid gameplay.

While Asobo does include support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 and 3, support for AMD's FSR 2.0 is missing, as is support for ray tracing. Ray tracing will be added in a later patch, and it's already mentioned in the game's config files, so I'm quite positive that they'll add this feature soon. As you can see in our image comparison tool, the differences between the various graphics presets are tiny, just like the FPS differences between them. I feel like Asobo should have given owners of low-end hardware a much more useful "low" preset, even if that means lower rendering quality—the point of presets is to offer meaningful options.

In the duel AMD vs NVIDIA, the game does prefer NVIDIA slightly, but the differences are minor. For example, usually we see the RX 6800 XT a little bit ahead of the RTX 3080, here the positioning is reversed. VRAM requirements are very reasonable, too, a 4 GB graphics card should be able to handle 1080p just fine, even though 6 GB will be better. For 1440p 6 GB will be plenty, and for 4K you should have an 8 GB framebuffer size.