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A Plague Tale: Innocence is genuinely gorgeous; if you spent any amount of time in the game world you will know exactly what I mean. The lighting is beautiful, the environments are gorgeous, and the in built photo mode makes sure you can make any frame of the gameplay look like a cutscene. Mix this with the occasional unforgettable, unique scenario you find yourself in, and you got the foundation for a potential classic of a game.
However, that's about it. Like literally, that's it. Beyond the visuals, there's nothing about this game that stands out in a good way. The voice acting is mediocre, the characters are mildly irritating, and the stealth mechanics, which are supposed to stand at the core of the experience, are so poorly executed that they shatter any sense of immersion. It’s almost comical how bad they are - I found myself laughing out loud several times at the absurdity of what was happening on screen. The formula is always the same: “Oh no, there are guards! Let’s distract them by making some noise.” You can either throw a rock at something metal to divert their attention for an unrealistically long time, or toss a pot to achieve the same effect, allowing you to sneak past while they stand around cluelessly until their alert meter resets. Even if you get caught, simply ducking behind a wall or into a bush is enough to confuse your pursuer, who loses track of you as long as you keep crouching, even if you’re just a couple of meters away.
Just to prove a point here; this is your average stealth moment in this game: https://youtu.be/INfn_Xe1G18
Apart from the lost potential of the stealth mechanic, there's also a lot of missed opportunities and lost potential when it comes to the world itself. As I mentioned before; the game's gorgeous. Like really gorgeous, especially if you take into account how small of a team is actually behind this title. But what's the main thing you want to do in pretty worlds if you're anything like me? Explore; and there's nothing of that present here. You can't even *slightly* stray off the intended path in this game. In a figurative sense there's a bold, red line on the ground guiding your every step, and if you even dare trying to step off it, you either die or... well, can't do it in the first place. It's just one of the many handholding aspects in this game that cut the actual game interaction to a minimum.
And there's a lot of that. Oh man, there's a lot of handholding. Just make a Life Is Strange ripoff at this point instead of disguising all these scripted events as gameplay or "puzzles". A four year old could finish every aspect of this game without much trouble (don't test that theory tho, this game is pretty violent at times). Said handholding either occurs in the form of the elephant in the room, aka one interactable object in the area that can only be used for one purpose, in one direction, or in one way; or in the form of overexplaining and repeating things. Your slingshot is a tool you use throughout the entirety of the game, but the way you use it gets incredibly repetitive quite quickly. "Shoot this chain so XYZ object falls down", "shoot this chain so XYZ gate opens", etc.. Every scene that can even remotely be called a "puzzle" has one obvious answer and one obvious answer only, and a lot of the time it's just the same thing you did in the prior chapters. And if you, for some reason, take longer than 15 seconds to do something, your (very annoying) 5 year old brother or whichever companion is with you at the time will tell you exactly what to do and you'll get a prompt to press F to look at the object of interest. Where's the fun in that?
This game is a 17 chapter borefest that tries to convince you that there's an interesting game and story under the facade. Don't let the graphics fool you.