Now that I've blogged about Elder Holland's talk once or twice, I want to spend just one more blog post complaining about A Plague Tale: Innocence.
At the start of the game, the protagonists are totally innocent. They're kids. Sure, the player character, Amicia, is a teenager, and she has a chip on her shoulder, but that's fairly understandable. By and large, they're good kids, and they're certainly good people; however, the world they live in (and are trying not to die in) is not friendly to those with high moral standards. The kids manage to escape the slaughter of their family with their innocence intact, but by the end of the second chapter of the game, Amicia has to take one life to save her brother and then another life to save herself. Both of those acts were entirely justifiable, but in her mind, she had blood on her hands, and the game does an okay job of portraying the moral weight of the killings she has to commit to keep herself and her brother alive.
However, as the game progresses, killing gets easier for Amicia. There are times when she (or rather, the player controlling her) kills guards because it's easier and safer than trying to sneak away from them without killing them. And there are times when the kills, avoidable or otherwise, are not as quick and clean as a slung stone to the head. After a certain point in the game, one of the strongest weapons in Amicia's arsenal is the ability to douse the flames of lanterns that keep the rats at bay, allowing the rats to eat enemy soldiers alive. These kills should be harrowing for Amicia, but I didn't get the impression that they bothered her any more than killing guards quickly did. And worse yet, by the end of the game, under Amicia's direction, Hugo uses his rat-controlling powers against dozens of guards, with neither child showing any psychological or emotional effects from that.
Judging by the name of the game, I had hoped that A Plague Tale: Innocence would have explored the idea of innocence and given the player the option and the incentive to maintain it, or to at least explore the consequences of not doing so, but by the end of the game, the idea of innocence is all but forgotten, and the children seem willing to kill guards, not because they have to, but because it's easier than trying not to. Perhaps that, itself, is a consequence of losing one's innocence. Having had to kill guards to save their own lives, perhaps the characters became desensitized to killing, and the game is trying to serve as a cautionary tale against the desensitization caused by a loss of innocence. Yet, if that was the game's intent, that meaning didn't seem very clear to me. It seemed to me that the children killed their way to the villain of the story, killed him, and then went on their merry way as though nothing had happened. I understand that people like happy endings, but people also like realistic stories, and, realistically, those children should have been traumatized by the lives they had taken.
Taking a life carries a heavy moral weight. Even when the killing is perfectly justified and completely necessary, a person doesn't just shrug it off, especially when the death is brutal, long, and obviously painful. The game started well, showing the moral weight of even justified, necessary, quick, clean kills. But then the kids got the power, both magical and non-magical, to sick rats on other people, and they used that power without any apparent moral repercussions.
A Plague Tale: Innocence could have been great. It could have been a tragic story of unfortunate children forced, through no fault of their own, into a desperate situation in which they had to take desperate measures to survive. The game could have explored the effects their situation would have had on them and on their relationship with each other. The game could have given moral weight to every human life, even the lives of the enemy guards, by showing the toll all those killings must have (and should have) taken on the protagonists' young minds. I'd hate to see children, even fictional children, traumatized by being forced to kill others, but I also hated seeing so many killings go completely unacknowledged. There should have been some consequences. And, preferably, there should have been another way to get to the main villain besides having all his guards eaten by rats. The game had started as a stealth game. There should have been a way to get through the last chapter of the game using stealth.
But I think I'm done complaining about A Plague Tale: Innocence. I've said my peace. I just wish it had ended differently, especially since it had started so well. I would have loved for the themes and mechanics of the game to stay consistent over the whole course of the game. And I would have liked for there to have been some moral weight to the characters' actions. A kid shouldn't be able to kill countless people with magical rat powers and then just run around like a normal kid three days later. Those deaths should have meant something. All lives do.
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