A Critique of A Plague Tale: Innocence

At the beginning of... ...The Witcher, there is an area in the introductory tower that you cannot access. There is a locked door that you cannot go through until you progress through the tutorial to a certain point and then receive a key. Somehow the enemies have entered in another way, but that doesn't matter. What matters is this cooking station in another part of the room. Geralt, like anyone, is able to enter this room through this opening. There is enough space for you to squeeze around the kitchen frame, or hide under it, or lift it up and move it.

But the game won't let you do these things. Instead, you have to wait until they give you the key because this is the only written way to enter this room. In the recent remake of Resident Evil 2 there are sections of the Raccoon City police station that use walls invisible to zombies. No matter how much Leon or Claire are injured, bleeding or limping, and about to become food for the hungry and the dead, these zombies will not follow you across these invisible boundaries between some areas. These are not reinforced doors and, no matter how close the zombies are to grabbing you, the instant you step over these lines they fall into a passive state and begin to move away as if you became invisible.

So what do these two things have to do with A Plague Tale: Innocence? Well, I'm using them as a way to gauge your tolerance for this kind of thing because A Plague Tale is full of these kinds of situations. None of these examples given are inherently bad, especially from a strict gameplay perspective. Games will often have abstract rules and limitations to make the game work the way the developer wants it to work. Games are rarely realistic and I don't think they should change either, games should be internally consistent within their own rules and worlds. However, this can only be stretched so far before it breaks no matter what.

In the case of The Witcher's cooking station, it seems stupid, it doesn't alter how exploration works in that game because you're pretty limited in how to move around the areas and the game relies on that. The problem here is not a lack of freedom, but that the space should have been smaller or the cooking station larger. Basically, this opening in the wall should appear much less accessible. In the case of Resident Evil 2, it is a trade-off of your immersion for some areas of the game to be safe from zombies. It seems stupid because there is no justification for it within the game world.

The first aid spray can cure zombie bites and bring you back from the brink of death is also stupid, but it is acceptable because it is clearly presented to you that the item has this function. Heal your character and correct your mistakes. This justification does not exist for the zombies nor for the kitchen framework in Kaer Morhen. Here's the point: if this sort of thing irritates you deeply, I suggest you never play A Plague Tale unless you enjoy being frustrated. The game has a script written in stone that you can rarely deviate from and even when you do, the game often breaks instead of being able to adapt to something that is done out of order or something that a player never thought a player could do, goes further. requiring you to do complicated things to solve problems because that's how the scene was planned when the alternative solution, which is both obvious and simple, would break it and the game is too serious and not fun enough for that to feel good .

We still don't like spoilers, so here's a simple example.