A Plague Tale: Innocence

Combination of walking simulator, ranged combat, puzzles, stealth, item collecting and crafting. Unfortunately not any of these gameplay elements is addictive. But some people do really enjoy the story. Plusses: + You can customize your gameplay style a bit via upgrades + Fast loading times + There are enough automatic save points Minuses: - Too many instant death / fail sections - Boss fights are clunky - Enemy AI is buggy - No good stealth area indicators Ugly: * Innocence is completely wrong title for this game

The game started very nicely and did a fantastic job of introducing the characters and the storyline. But the further along it progressed, the more the gameplay was like being trapped on a set of rails. Towards the end, the safe-spots were so far apart that all the fluidity was entirely gone, and I found the last 2 or 3 hours incredibly dull and boring. It's still a good game in a beautiful (or beautifully ugly) setting and has a lot going for it, but in terms of gameplay I'd simply expected something more fresh.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's a good story which is tense, but more like a European drama than a superhero movie. You play as a teenage girl with a sling, and sneak your way around guards and through dark caverns, so it's more of a human story than a Chuck Norris roleplay. Pretty much the whole game is on rails, you don't have many options, it's all auto-aim, and cut-scenes make up about half of quite a few sections, so the gameplay is just something to add a bit of involvement in the story really. The visuals are beautiful, some of the cinematography in the cut-scenes is incredible, and some of the areas you walk through as well. There is a lot of use of time-of-day specific lighting, shadows, and spectacular architecture. The game really focussed on delivering something to look at and a story to tell, and the gameplay never took over. The gameplay isn't bad, it's even satisfying sometimes, but it's toned down. It's good storytelling, and worth playing.

▲ What at first seems like a puzzle game with only officially recognized intended solutions, is actually a game that lets you exploit the various mechanical complexities to bypass challenges in unintended ways. A lot of players probably only did the most obvious thing, thinking that there are only "the right solution" to everything. ▲ Very well optimized. Runs perfectly fine. ▲ Completely customizable UI ►►► Extremely well produced stealth tutorials. ►► Very good pacing. The game has a cycle of escalations and moments of calm. ► Good use of color shades to give the player valuable feedback. ► Many other visual and aural feedback mechanisms to give info to the player about their surroundings. ► The majority of stealth segments can be completed without engaging in any violence. Also, the game often narratively implements the possibility of non-violence and acknowledges your mercy. ► Special items that can take out enemies non-lethally or remove obstacles permanently are very expensive to produce so, you need to decide what to make and use ◄ Many instances of annoying Cutscene Incompetence where the player is not allowed to use the game's mechanics to overcome an obstacle. This often also leads into unavoidable combat scenes. ◄ Sometimes, albeit rarely, the game expects a specific outcome so you can get stuck if you don't do what the game expects. For example there can be a section where all your enemies need to be neutralized, which arbitrarily triggers a scripted event. ◄ The last few levels completely abandon the concept of stealth and just assume that you'll kill every enemy you come across. ◄ Semi-interactive ingame story sequences are unskippable unlike the cutscenes ◄◄ Impatient NPCs give you solutions to puzzles if you're too slow ▼▼ Certain graphics effects cannot be disabled in the options menu despite the fact that a boolean value for deactivating them exists in the configuration files.

This is by far the best game I have played all year. It's a true work of art from a fairly small dev team. The graphics, pacing, music, voice acting, script, story, scenery are all brilliant. And the game runs like a charm. The only thing that pisses me off is that GOG released it here so late compared to steam where I played it. I would have prefered to purchase it here.