A Plague Tale: Innocence is an Asobo Studio action-adventure stealth game published by Focus Home Interactive. It was launched on May 14, 2019 for Microsoft...
A Plague Tale: Innocence
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Asobo Studio is a French developer based in Bordeaux, founded in 2002 by a group of twelve developers who left Kalisto Entertainment. The studio's name comes from the Japanese "asobo," meaning "let's play," and it builds most of its games on its own engine, Zouna, which traces back to code those founders wrote in the 1990s. For much of its history Asobo worked quietly as a licensed and support studio, and today it stands behind two of the most different games in modern gaming: the intimate, story-driven A Plague Tale series and the planet-spanning Microsoft Flight Simulator.
A Plague Tale: Innocence, released in 2019 and published by Focus Home Interactive, is the game that turned Asobo from a support studio into a name of its own. It follows Amicia and her younger brother Hugo through a plague-ravaged 14th-century France overrun by swarms of rats, blending stealth, puzzle solving, and a dark, character-driven story. It sold more than a million copies and earned strong reviews. The 2022 sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, continued the siblings' story on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch, scoring in the low 80s and launching day one on Xbox Game Pass.
The third entry, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, releases August 27, 2026 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC, again published by Focus Entertainment. It is a prequel set 15 years before A Plague Tale: Requiem, moving away from Amicia and Hugo to follow Sophia, the plunderer introduced in Requiem, on a journey to the Minotaur's Island alongside a companion named Leni. Asobo has described it as a more combat-heavy take on the series. It launches day one on Xbox Game Pass and is an Xbox Play Anywhere title, continuing the pattern set by Requiem.
In 2020 Asobo shipped Microsoft Flight Simulator, a recreation of the entire Earth built from petabytes of Bing Maps data streamed through Microsoft's cloud. It was one of the most technically staggering releases of its generation, and Asobo followed it with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 in November 2024. Different teams inside Asobo handle the two franchises, which is how a single studio ships a linear medieval horror game and a global flight sim in the same window, though both run on the same house engine.
Before the breakthrough, Asobo spent years as the studio behind licensed and support projects, and its back catalog is a surprising list. It developed video game adaptations of Pixar films including Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille, and Toy Story 3, plus Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure. It also worked as a support and porting studio on titles such as ReCore and The Crew 2. That stretch is easy to overlook now, but it is where the studio built the technical range that later let it pull off both A Plague Tale and Flight Simulator.
The through-line across Asobo's work is a studio defined by contrast. It can build a quiet, tightly authored story about two siblings and a plague, then turn around and model the whole planet, all on an engine it has maintained and rebuilt for decades. Few developers cover that much ground, and it is why Asobo has gone from an anonymous work-for-hire outfit to one of the more respected studios in Europe.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is an Asobo Studio action-adventure stealth game published by Focus Home Interactive. It was launched on May 14, 2019 for Microsoft...