9 Video Games That Used Everything You'd Learned Against You

3. A Plague Tale: Innocence

A Plague Tale is an incredible sleeper hit from 2019. You’re cast in the shoes of Amicia de Rune traversing plague-ridden France in the 1300s and trying to protect her little brother Hugo.

The headline here is that rats are bad. Really bad. Fire keeps them away but if that’s not there to help you out they’ll eat anything in their path, friend and foe alike. This is a lesson you learn very early on and though you need to skirt the rats yourself, you can use them against your foes by shooting out lanterns and the like. That being said, further into the game you have to unlearn this hard earned lesson where you’ve been s**t-scared of rats for almost the entire game. Now I’m going to spoil some things here and I really want you to play this game so tune out for the next minute or so if you don’t want to know what happens. Okay, cool.

You see, they figure out that Hugo can control the rats.

Okay, so now rats are good. We like the rats, no problem.

It’s a real adjustment to turn the primary enemies in the game into your primary allies and it really spins the mechanics on their head now you’ll be approaching every encounter differently. Then enter the final act, now the rats are bad again. But only some rats. You see it turns out Hugo can control most of the rats but not the special white rats controlled by the big bad Grand Inquisitor, so there’s some finageling to moosh your good rats into the bad rats to ultimately take him out. It’s a good battle and a great game, but it sure does keep you on your toes swapping around allegiances and making you reassess what lessons you’ve learned.