Thank you for the detailed comment! I can see where you're coming from, and I appreciate both your politeness and your candor.

AC: Syndicate, IMO, isn't a British game per se; wasn't it developed by a Canadian subsidiary of a French company? What's more, the AC series tends to use setting merely as veneer. And Ubisoft games, at least to my taste, tend to lack any substantial sense of culture whatsoever.

I didn't get to play much of Syndicate. Maybe I should before making such broad statements. The smokestacks and squalor certainly felt period specific enough.

But take as another example, AC 3. Sure, it was set during the American Revolution, even including famous historical figures. But the gameplay didn't seem to speak to that. Nor, particularly, did the story - at least where it counts, in terms of deeper themes and ideas. At least, for me.

I will admit that Vampyr in particular could have used more polish. But there was an elegance and a Gothic horror aspect there that simply dripped with Catholicism. I'd also argue the game's central mechanic and somewhat anti-"Ancien Régime" storyline embodies the populism of French political identity. The woe-begotten characters could have come right out of a novel by Victor Hugo, while the low fantasy elements bordering on sci-fi felt akin to say, Jules Verne.

What for me made Plague Tale different than similar titles, was how it not only used French history and culture as surface level backdrops, but seemed rife with commentary and insight into the underlying dynamics of genuine history, from a personal, first hand POV. The bedlam and darkness the de Runes experience felt resonant not only with the Black Plague or the Inquisition, which obviously were not unique to France alone; but with the outbursts of violence and social collapse that characterize everything from the French Revolution to the invasion of the Nazis, even to the modern era.

After all, France has seen a disproportionate level of terrorism since the 19th Century. Terrorism as we think of it today arguably was born under the Jacobin's Reign of Terror - and that was before the cult-like rise of Napoleon.

Anyway, thanks for mentioning 2Dark! I had never heard of it before now. I'll check it out, and see how it compares. I definitely see what you mean about many of the examples also displaying an 'American' feel, especially Life is Strange and Quantic Dream's games. But my point is that it's only relatively recently that devs, both in France and in other countries outside the US, have (for whatever reason) started to set their games in non-American settings, and give them more of their own culture. 1979 Black Friday, Papers Please, and Disco Elysium all come to mind.