A Critique of A Plague Tale: Innocence

At the beginning of... ...The Witcher, there is an area in the introductory keep 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 you are given a key. Somehow, the enemies have gotten in the other way, but that doesn't matter. What matters is this cooking station in another part of the room. Geralt, like any person, is able to enter this room through this opening. There is enough room for him to get around the cooking frame or to duck under it or to pick it up and move it.

But the game will not allow you to do these things. Instead, you have to wait until you are given the key because this is the only programmed way to enter this room. In the recent Resident Evil 2 remake, there are sections of the Raccoon City police station that use invisible walls for zombies. No matter how much Leon or Claire is injured, bleeding or limping and about to become a meal 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 cross these lines, they fall into a passive state and start walking 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 type of thing because A Plague Tale is full of this type of situation. None of these given examples is inherently bad, especially from a strict gameplay perspective. Games will often have abstract rules and constraints to make the game work the way the developer wants it to work. Games are rarely realistic and I don't think they need to change either, games need to 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 cooking station, it seems stupid, it doesn't explain how exploration works in that game because you're pretty limited in how you move through areas and the game builds on that. The problem here is not a lack of freedom, it's that the space should have been smaller or the cooking station bigger. Basically, this opening in the wall should look much less accessible. In the case of Resident Evil 2, it's a trade off of your immersion so that some areas of the game are safe from zombies.

It seems stupid because there is no justification for it within the game world. First aid spray can heal zombie bites and bring you back from the brink of death is also stupid, but acceptable because it is clearly presented to you that the item has this function. heal your character correct your mistakes. This justification does not exist for the zombies nor for the cooking 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 set in stone that you can rarely deviate from and even when you do, the game often breaks rather than being able to adapt to something being done out of order or something a player never thought they could do. , Going more beyond of that. by asking you to do complicated things to solve problems because that's how the scene was planned when the workaround, which is both obvious and simple, would break it and the game is too serious and not good enough for it to feel right .

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