Hi everyone! Kevin Choteau here, Game Director at Asobo and very excited about everything we’ve been working on to bring you A Plague Tale: Requiem! The game releases on October 18 on PlayStation 5, three years after its prequel, Innocence. So time has passed, and so has it for our two heroes, Amicia and Hugo, who we’ll meet in Requiem six months after we said goodbye to them in Innocence. They’re both children, subject to constant evolution, so you can expect them to have changed! And that’ll impact how you play with them… Let’s look a bit into it right now.

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The End of Innocence

Hugo and Amicia have had to evolve a great deal, and to evolve fast to face the trials that life puts in front of them. They’re confronted with the extreme cruelty of their time, and experience atrocities and events that are far bigger than them. So their personalities and their abilities evolve in the process. Amicia learns to fight and to kill, and Hugo learns to use his power. And that does not strictly involve physical skills, it also means to deal with the morality of their actions and the trauma such amount of violence may cause. 

Following the events of Innocence, Amicia’s more hardened in combat. This is made clear by looking at her new set of weapons, which not only includes an improved version of the sling she was using in Innocence, but also a crossbow—a weapon of war.

Hugo was really just a spectator at the start of Innocence, discovering the world and marvelling at everything. But he becomes active as he becomes aware of the danger: he has an extraordinary power that he started using at the end of Innocence, and he continues down that path in Requiem.

So our two heroes have matured, and they are prepared for action. But it’s a lot to ask two children, and assuming these roles means developing a sense of darkness. That will be part of how they can use their abilities: weighing their actions and how much darkness they let in will be key to making it through.

Amicia’s Abilities 

Learning to control herself will be one of Amicia’s main challenges. Her trauma resurfaces and she has to deal with how far she can go to protect her brother. Her struggle to learn and accept to use force and to kill can lead her to develop a taste for it. Requiem constantly puts her in the position to question the limits of survival and protection instincts. She&

Speculative fiction often turns the lens back on the reader, making the previously unknown become knowable by turning it into story.

It’s long been used as a vehicle for representation, from Star Trek exploring new frontiers of romance, to Octavia Butler positioning a Black woman at the forefront of humanity’s escape to space in Parable of the Sower, to dystopian YA like The Hunger Games tapping into every young woman’s desire to change the world by burning it down.

I’m Lindsay Ishihiro, and as the narrative designer of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I’d like to tell you about the ways our game follows in this tradition, breaking new ground in how players represent themselves and their gender, sexuality, and relationships in a video game.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a genre-spanning game about growing up on an extrasolar colony: part life simulator, deck builder, roleplaying game, and dating simulator. You play Sol, a child whose parents – unhappy with their life on a dying Earth – flung themselves into space intending to create a new human culture from the ground up on the planet Vertumna IV.

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Given absolute freedom, what do a group of idealists preserve from human cultures, and what do they reject? And what do they accidentally bring with them, despite their best intentions?

Exocolonist’s simple character creation system hits far above its weight class. There are only two questions: what are Sol’s pronouns, and will they grow to appear masculine, androgynous, or feminine?

Even the UI to select Sol’s appearance is a slider instead of three buttons, giving the player a chance to say their Sol is ‘just a little’ masculine or feminine.

They/them is included in the standard pronoun selection, but players who prefer a more bespoke experience can teach it to use their correct pronouns and other gendered terms. In space, anyone can be fae/faeself.

You can even change their pronouns and appearance at any time, no gender-changing items or cursed springs required.

Sol’s anatomy is set later, during puberty – but there’s even an option for Sol having no reproductive anatomy at all, thanks to futuristic medical technology. Anatomy being separate from appearance and pronouns allows for a huge spectrum of possible genders, encompassing cis bodies, binary and non-

PlayStation Store welcomes the Games Under promotion, starting Wednesday August 17. Until Tuesday August 30* enjoy discounts on the likes of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – Deluxe Edition, The Crew 2 Gold Edition, Diablo III: Eternal Collection and many more titles.