A Plague Tale: Innocence review – who let the rats out

A tale of two 12th-century French children confronting an ever more malevolent and verminous world casts a beguiling spell

A Plague Tale: Innocence opens on a scene of idyllic playfulness: a teenage girl, Amicia, walking her dog through an autumnal forest in 12th-century France, bumping apples from tall trees using pebbles hurled from a homemade slingshot. If this is the "innocence" of the game's title, it plays but a fleeting cameo role in the drama. Before the day is out, Amicia's dog is dead - ripped apart by a thrashing mass of rabid vermin - along with her former life of privilege as a French noble, ripped apart by soldiers of the inquisition, thugs acting on behalf of an equally corrupt church.

Amicia and her younger brother Hugo, a boy who suffers from a blood disease and has spent his days in jaundiced confinement, escape the family estate and begin to pick their way through a countryside turned hostile. This is, then, a story of innocence versus experience, of children versus the ruined world of adults, with all its plagues, both physical and ideological.