A Plague Tale: Innocence

+ Moody and atmospheric
+ Great rat physics
- Formulaic and predictable storyline
- Annoying characters

Completed.

Plague Tale is a stealth focused title that is set on medieval ridden europe. You play as Amicia, a teenage girl that is focusing on surviving and protecting his 4 year old brother, after enemy soldiers killed your parents and destroyed your village for reasons initially unclear.

The visuals almost fool me for being AAA, particularly when it comes to the environmental detail. Its also well animated, except for the faces of anyone outside of the main cast. It definitly looks a notch above what you expect from such a studio, but this comes at a cost of interactivity, as the linears are extremely linear, and the way that you interact with the environment is also very limited.

Storywise its rather predictable, but it still pulls some decent emotional punches. The villains are a bit too overdramatic and his motivations shallow, but it works out well in the end. Its well acted, and even the characters keep making questionable decisions their struggle is still empathetic.

Mechanically the game is really very limited. You basically are tasked with transversing these very small and linear sections, with either soldiers, rats or both serving as obstacles. You are giving a sling and some special types of ammo that gradually increase throughout the game. Unfortunatly despite the range of tools available increasing, the obvious choice is still very predictable, and the game never opens up to the point where it actually require thought to use your entire arsenal. Stealth itself is very banal, with some enemy soldiers running faster than you, so getting spotted is a game over in certain cases, as enemies kill you with one hit.. The game features autoaim, so its just a matter of time to wait for Amicia to get get aim right. I will stress out that gameplay never once gets satisfying throughout the whole game.

There is some exploration in the levels, with the possibility of grabbing collectibles and upgrade materials. The upgrade material feed right into small additions to the sling and bag, but these are barely noticeable and its clear that the bag was made in mind to be beaten without upgrades. It feels like an rpg system that was tacked on just to encourage exploration.

This is basically the result of a small studios that poured all their resources into the story, voice acting and visuals, but left everything else down to its minimum functionality. For me i enjoyed the story enough to make it worth playing once.

every aspect of this game is boring.

shooting is designed around auto-aim. i play competitive shooters so this thing cant interest me in any way. they even made me play this auto-aim bullcrap in the 17th chapter.

level design is repetitive. same puzzle again and again. when hugo was playable I felt something not because hugo's puzzle were good but due to different kind of puzzle. flaws are easy to find in game design when i keep repeating them for 15 hours..

i really don't care about stories in any art form.. stories are just added to give art more personality. now this story have a decent vibe but the characters are very poor. The voice acting is even more painful.

Linear story-driven adventure where our role is to escort a special child everyone is looking for in a post-apocalyptic world. Does it ring any bells?

Despite being developed by a small studio, "A Plague Tale: Innocence" delivers triple-A level graphics and quality art direction. Unfortunately, the plot and characters suffer from mediocre and derivative writing, but the plague-ridden late medieval setting has been recreated with an impressive level of detail. While the locations were always an extreme pleasure to look at, NPC models are limited and tend to be recycled a lot throughout the game. Facial animations also felt like they were at least a generation old, spoiling the magic during dialogues and cutscenes.

The gameplay mechanics do not differ from any other stealth/survival third-person adventure, but at the same time offer a rather refreshing take on environmental puzzles as you will be asked to manipulate light and darkness to make your way through menacing hordes of rats. Combat against human enemies is a little clunkier and, especially at the beginning, a little tedious. Throwing objects to distract enemies, hiding behind crates, and shooting with a sling sounds boring as hell, but new mechanics are gradually introduced thanks to the combination of alchemic substances that have various effects on the enemies and the environments.

Overall, the impression is that of a mediocre game that could have offered a lot more with a bigger budget.

I'm sure there is a good game hidden in there, but most of the time is only a self-indulgent game (pun intended) in almost every aspect of it. The level design is awfully inconsistent and the story is bold enough to be interesting but is pulled down by the uncharesmatic cast of characters.

Remember how so many great games suffer from those occasional forced stealth parts? For example how this truly amazing and free roaming experience with Breath of the Wild just grinded to an absolute soul-crushing halt in that one sneaky-sneaky place? How you would just want to punch someone in the face, smash the controller to tiny atoms and burn a barn full of puppies down, just to skip that god-awful bit?

Now imagine making about half of your game like that. Voila! A Plague Tale: Frustration. The options open up a tiny bit as you progress, but it still sucks to sneak in this game.
I might have been able to suffer through much of it if the story and characters grabbed me, but they just didn't. Rather, Hugo just draggs everything down, from gameplay to narrative. Such an annoying little piece of... And Amicia is so cookie-cutter bland and normal, bleh.

This is a story-driven game and 100% linear, which in itself can be fine. I enjoy a bit of "movie-game" from time to time where you are almost only pushing forward on the left stick and pressing a button once in a while. I mean, Life is Strange is one of my absolute favorite games and the gameplay is about as basic as it can get there.
That's why A Plague Tale: Stiffness bothers me so much: it acts like a third-person adventure game. The controller scheme is so familiar that when the first boss dude appeared I instinctively pressed B to dodge. But the problem is that the characters are not your typical hero/protagonist, so they move like bricks. The experience feels like you are walking through mud, which I guess is what they went for (great work!) but it just isn't enjoyable.
"HUGO FOR THE LAST TIME, COME OVER HERE YOU LITTLE SHIT!"

So at the end of it all: I don't care about these people and the gameplay is a bore. Hard pass.