Tales of the Black Death

Medieval Europe becomes a hostile road map of grief, superstition, and spreading disease in this grim interactive-fiction adventure. You follow Baldasar, an Italian boy left alone after a mysterious sickness takes his parents, as he searches for safety while the Black Death advances across the continent. The story unfolds over three connected chapters spanning Italy, France, and England, each presenting a harsher portrait of a society collapsing under fear and loss. Its tone is intimate rather than epic: survival depends as much on whom Baldasar trusts as on the dangers waiting beyond the next town.

Play centers on reading tense encounters and making decisions that shape Baldasar’s relationships, priorities, and moral direction. Early on, he travels with a thief, later protects a French child searching for her mother, and eventually reaches plague-stricken London alongside deserters from an army. Bandits, frightened villagers, soldiers, disease, and desperate survivors turn even ordinary travel into a difficult judgment call. Instead of fast action combat or resource-heavy survival systems, the challenge comes from choosing how Baldasar responds when compassion, self-preservation, loyalty, and vengeance point in different directions.

Its strongest asset is the historical journey itself, following the plague’s westward spread while keeping the focus on one vulnerable protagonist rather than kings or battles. The three-part structure gives the narrative a sense of movement and escalation, with every region offering different companions, threats, and reasons to question what kind of person Baldasar is becoming. Sparse, text-led presentation makes it best suited to players who enjoy choice-based stories such as Choice of Games titles or the quieter narrative side of adventure games. Anyone seeking deep mechanical systems or action may find it limited, but players interested in bleak historical fiction and consequential character decisions will find a focused, unsettling survival tale.