A Plague Tale: Innocence

I agree with most of the other reviews that this is a really good game, but it's not a great game. It gets 5 stars for: (a) the story (b) voice acting (c) the graphics & sound (d) the controls (e) upgrades at workbenches But serious defects in game design and gameplay cost it 2 stars in my opinion. The following three things nearly killed the game for me: (1) It's not truly an open game world. It's a disguised "rail game". This is the game's biggest flaw. Every single level has many places you can plainly see and should be able to reach, but you can't. Whether it's climbing behind a wall for cover in a village, or climbing a barrel to reach an open 2nd story window in a house, or going off the main trail in forests to use trees and bushes for cover, every single level is full of places that you can plainly see but you can't reach due to artificial, invisible barriers. There's initially the illusion of options, but in reality the game designers give you a very limited (often only one) path through any given level. (2) Monotonous gameplay. This game rehashes the same handful of basic scenarios over and over and over... Although they're packaged in different locations, different number of NPC's to avoid, more/less rats, it's basically the same thing through the whole game. (3) Game needs quick save feature. Yes checkpoints are relatively generous. But if you're going to force players down a very limited number of predetermined paths on each and every level, then at least give the player the choice to do a quick save when needed. It's just plain frustrating to distract and sneak pat the same guard 10 times because the game designers force you on a specific path through each level. If not a quick save, then at least a checkpoint every time an NPC is avoided. It succeeded on story, but failed on stealth and gameplay. Stealth games with great stories that deserve 4-5 stars include Thief, Splinter Cell, Dishonored, Hitman and Metal Gear Solid.

This is one of the few games that got me feeling invested in the characters early on and kept me that way right to the end. Even though the game is very linear, the level design does a good job of sustaining the illusion that you are in a larger world, rather than going down a series of corridors. The stealth feels satisfying, as you are always on the back foot, even with upgrades. Minor caveat: if you're even a little bit of a history nerd, you'll have to suspend disbelief around the clothing and armour design.

I actually loved this game and wanted to give it a 4/5 rating, but then the fight with final boss happened. Throughout the entire game I never had to check what to do in the internet, but in order to defeat the final boss I needed to watch a YT tutorial. This fight is so annoying, repetitive and devoid of logic that it really destroys the whole experience. It's almost offensive how the developers decided to punish the customers who spent hours playing this otherwise rather simple and story driven game with a bizarre final stage that has nothing to do with the rest of the game. How is it possible that no one in the studio stopped this from happening? Major disappointment because as I said earlier, before that the game was pretty great.

While I'll start this by warning you how little "game" there's to be played. I assure you the story is worth it all the way. The characters are believable and are full of life; the dialogues, the voice acting, the overall plot is so very good! You can see how bonds are built and broken between the characters you encounter. There's this feeling of reality throughout the whole game, even with all the the silly magic, alchemy and crafting you get inmerse in this world. Gameplay wise, the progression of skills and artifacts feels very organic and cohesive. There's this one aspect I didn't quite like. You are playing as a teenager who's forced to kill people as part of the storyline (there's no "peaceful" option for a couple of enemies). When I first started playing the game, I accidentally killed a guard in the first town cause I didn't know a little rock in a sling would kill him and there was this very horrible reaction from the main character (again, a teenage girl). It caught me off-guard how bad her reaction was when she realized she killed a man. That I loved. I decided to restart the mision and go full pacifist. At the first boss I realized that wasn't an option but, when I beat him Amicia's reaction wasn't as impactful (note that I had restarted the mision). Later in the game there was this section that got me frustrated so I started killing everyone just to get it done and, eventhough side character call you out and get scared everytime you kill somebody, I came to realize that only that very first was impactful... Of course Amicia gets emotional everytime you kill a main baddie, but every other enemy is inconsequential to the game as a whole. Killing enemies on your way becomes more of a shore to ease your journey and you may even get some good loot out of it. So I played the game in the hardest difficulty and forced myself to not kill anyone passed the 4th lvl and loved the game, even if I took every exploit I manage to find besides killing.

Repetition is the true plague with this one. I often questioned my own sanity watching my character slam countless steel doors, slipping through tight crevices, hopping up onto ledges, only to hop back down a ledge moments later and continue running yet another linear path, only 6 feet away from the path I was just running down. This game is nothing but an endless, exhausting onslaught of questionable level design, marred further by its very poor attempts at stealth and combat. I truly could not believe how by-the-numbers it all felt by the time I hit chapter 10 of this overly ambitious nightmare of a game. It isn't just the characters going through hell, it's the player. How many more of these copy/paste segments can one handle, while characters whisper loudly within tall grass, waiting for the precise moment to extinguish a guards flame, so he'll be murdered by rats? According to the developers, there are no limitations here. Did they forget we've already seen this gameplay in Innocence? It's not that this gameplay doesn't work well because Innocence managed to pull it off. It's that they utterly failed to pace it properly. The gameplay segments are a total after-thought. At one point, I found myself just totally zoned out like a mindless zombie, wafting through another boring scene of Amicia and Hugo just hopping on ledges and ducking through some fallen debris, hoping there would be maybe a guard or something to kill, but no, this went on for over an hour. Speaking of debris, I was shocked at how oddly placed a lot of it was. There always seems to be something randomly placed to hop over and crouch behind. It looks very funny as the game goes on. You'll be inside a catacomb that has not been entered in hundreds of years, only to see still-burning embers, and debris placed perfectly to hop over-- right on a bridge. They use these things as a trigger for another scene to begin and it's so embarrassingly awful.