Before 2019, I had never heard of Asobo Studio and why would I have? Prior to its breakthrough that year, the developer was primarily known for its Pixar adaptations, including games based on Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille, and Toy Story 3, plus Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure. Their more mainstream efforts were largely as a support studio — assisting Ubisoft on The Crew 2, and Comcept and Armature Studio on ReCore — and porting or remastering existing games like The Crew 2 and Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection. Asobo wasn't a well-known or acclaimed developer, but it had been doing the work for 17 years before A Plague Tale: Innocence brought it widespread recognition.
That third-person stealth game ended up being one of my favorites of 2019, largely because I had zero expectations going in. As a freelancer, I reviewed a lot of smaller independent games, and when I got offered code for a story-driven narrative game set during the Plague, I assumed it was a visual novel or small-scale adventure game. So, when I started playing and was greeted by what felt like a double-A Naughty Dog game, I was incredibly surprised. I was engaged throughout (even during the rat tornadoes at the climax) and I left the experience eager to see what Asobo would do next.
I did not expect what Asobo did next to be Microsoft Flight Simulator. That acclaimed 2020 release used the power of the cloud and Microsoft's Bing maps data to offer the entire world as the biggest playground flight sim enthusiasts had ever encountered. I never played it — my PC almost certainly could not handle it — but I celebrated it for how different it was from most games released right now. But what really blew my mind was when I watched or read reviews and heard the developer's name. Asobo? That Asobo?! The very same.
The games couldn't be more different. One is a modestly scaled, linear, story-focused game set in medieval France during a fictionalized version of the Bubonic Plague. The other is whatever the most extreme opposite of modestly scaled is, a game using cutting edge technology to offer players the entirety of Earth. It is the opposite of linear, and the opposite of story-focused. In one, you play as a set character. In the other, you play as a bunch of planes.
Obviously, it's the same studio, but not the same team making both games. One Asobo team worked on A Plague Tale: Innocence, and its 2022 sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem, while another developed Microsoft Flight Simulator and its upcoming sequel Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Still, it's wild that both of those teams are under the same umbrella, and, that under that same umbrella is Remy the rat and Mr. Potato Head. But, I suspect it's that wealth of knowledge that comes from working on a wide variety of projects with a wide variety of teams that allows Asobo, 20-plus years into its run, to contain these multitudes, rats, planes, and everything in between.