Playing History - The Plague

I came to Playing History - The Plague expecting the quiet charm of a small historical curio, and what I found was something more complicated: a game that knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise. You play as Marchione, a young boy in Florence whose mother has fallen ill with what his father grimly suspects is the plague. Your job is to wander the city, talk to its residents, collect and combine items, and piece together enough knowledge to help her survive. The loop is classic point-and-click, rendered as simply as possible so it never frightens off its intended audience. The core mechanic that gives the game its small spark of personality is a pair of chrono goggles your character acquires early on. Put them on and you can spot anachronistic objects scattered across each scene - things that simply do not belong in medieval Florence. Clicking them triggers brief minigames and reinforces the historical framing in a way that feels more playful than a textbook ever could. There are also scattered quiz questions, a leech-application minigame, and a Tetris-adjacent puzzle at the cemetery. None of them are remotely challenging for an adult player, but they have a tactile scrappiness that younger players seem to respond to. The choices Marchione faces carry a little weight too - do you risk your health speaking to an infected stranger, do you stay in the city or flee to the countryside - and while the consequences are mild, they give the story a sense of moral texture. Where the game stumbles is in execution. The audio design is thin; some players have reported barely any music at all during their playthrough, which hollows out the atmosphere considerably. The art carries a storybook flatness that is charming in small doses but starts feeling same-y as you move from screen to screen, with character designs that share too many features. The whole thing runs two to four hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, and on modern systems you may hit bugs from its age - this was originally a web and tablet title before it came to Steam, and the seams show. Who is this actually for, then? Genuinely: younger players with a curiosity about medieval history, parents looking for something low-stress to share with a child, or the completionist who enjoys the Playing History series and wants the full set. The series has won recognition as a learning game in Europe, and that context matters - evaluated as classroom-adjacent software, it punches reasonably well. Evaluated as a PC adventure game sitting alongside genre contemporaries, it is too thin, too short, and too quiet to hold a dedicated gamer's attention. The Steam community sits around 76-80 percent positive across its small review pool, which feels about right: people who knew what they were walking into tend to be satisfied; anyone who showed up expecting a traditional adventure game did not.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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