How to completely ruin an otherwise wonderful gaming experience (Plague Tale on PS5)

Hopefully the picture of A Plague Tale: Innocence is enough to let people know what game I a referring to. I don't like having super long titles. We'll see. I can always edit it later.

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Before I rip into this horrible, one of the worst I've seen in gaming actually, sequences or "chapters", if you will, of the game, I want to say that this game is just outstanding aside from this one part.

The gameplay is simple, the controls are easy to get the hang of, it doesn't unnecessarily use all 37 buttons on the damn thing, and you can get back into the game after a long break with very little difficulty. Also, the graphics are fantastic, the story is compelling, and the voice acting is wonderful.

I find no fault in any of this. They mix up gameplay to keep it fun with a nice mix of stealth, light combat, and puzzle solving. It's great actually.

That is until you get to the part in a chapter called "Coronation" and I am sure that anyone that played this game on the PlayStation needs only the picture above to kick in their PTSD and will remember this dreaded part of the game that is just so poorly done on the part of the devs.

The deal here is that your friend, who is clearly here to sacrifice himself for your cause, has to push this cart down a lane where there are archers on the ridge and you have to hide behind it while it is moving. Later you will duck down into this little bunker area and there are some guys that are going to come at you that you need to kill with slingshot headshots much like you have done dozens of time before.

Sounds easy right? You've done this! No problem?

Well this is where the PS controller or something glitches out and screws everything up I think because the stairs that you are standing on or the enemy is approaching on and the aim assist is going to miss a LOT because of this.

If you don't get them before they hit the stairs or somehow you miss (the aim assist misses, whatever) you do not have enough of a chance to reload and will die immediately upon them making contact, which is normal.

For reasons nobody official has bothered to explain, the aim assist just decides to bug out at times and has you hit them in the chest, which of course does next to nothing.

This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for something really major and really poorly executed on the part of the developers. When you fail, and you will, a LOT, it puts you back to the very beginning of this entire endeavor including all the slow-moving dialogue about how Hugo will be protected behind the cart and how your friend there is going to do all the pushing himself.

This is not a cinematic and therefore it cannot be skipped. It's one of the only instances in the game where there is dialogue going on between characters while you are moving and your progression cannot move forward until many lines of dialogue have been spoken.

The amount of time that you cannot skip between the starting of pushing the cart and where you get to have another try at head shotting the 3 guards in a row with the aim-assist working against you, is 45 seconds. This cannot be skipped. You must sit through it.

This wouldn't be so bad if it was a section of the game that you were likely to figure out and do correctly after 2 or 3 times but jaysus man, I did it like 20 times and only made it past the 3 guards once and was like "crap man! finally" only to discover that we are not done yet, there is a slight delay and then more guards come from the other direction and you are fighting the aim-assist with these guards as well. I thought hat after nearly half an hour of listening to the same dialogue over and over to the point where I start to hate the characters and the game itself that I would be past it, but nope! If you lose at the hands of the 2nd wave of guards you have to go all the way back to the start.

Again, this wouldn't be so bad if it was just hard, or just slightly broken as far as the controls are concerned, but it is both of those things before we factor in the dialogue that you must sit though. This is before I even factor in the loading times, which is minimal because the PS5 is pretty powerful, but it adds up man and while I am an adult and control my emotions I was very close to tossing a controller for the first time in 30 years.

There are a total of 5 additional guards that approach from the rear in the 2nd part of this sequence and after having the aim-assist bug out on me several times in a row I looked online and found out that if you want the aim-assist to function normally, you need to get to the end of the stairs so that you are on the same level of ground as the guards are.

How did this make it past the people testing it? The rest of this game is damn near flawless and this is such a buggy mess that if it had been at the start of the game I don't think very many people would have bothered to play this.

I did, with the help of the interweb, manage to get past this one sequence but it was on of the most frustrating over-an-hour sessions of gaming that I have ever endured. I only did endure it because according to my progress percentage, I knew I was naer the end of the game and I was pretty invested in the story at that point, which is a very very very good story.

I suppose one good thing that happened here is that the rest of the game seemed exceptionally easy compared to what I had just endured and that includes the final boss fight, which was absolutely outstanding: it was innovative, creepy, well-acted, emotional, and well just one of the best boss fights in recent history.

It's a damn shame that the cart sequence before that is such a frustrating mess on Playstation and that they didn't fix it. Something this big, they had to have known about it but perhaps there was just nothing to be done about it and they thought most people who got this far would just "deal with it" and endure.

Well they were quite wrong about that. According to many different message boards I have looked at a great percentage of people quit on the game after this point because it was affecting their mental health and many claim to have destroyed TV's and controllers over this. A great percentage of the people involved said their sole reason for NOT purchasing the follow-up title named Requium was because of this one stage and how it completely destroyed their impression of Focus Entertainment which is the company behind this game.

Apparently this bug or glitch or just lapse in quality control exists only on the PlayStation and in all other versions of the game the aim assist is just fine.

Thank god that is the case with the Nintendo Switch version. I can't imaging how maddening it would be to wait for that relative potato to reload the scene every time you fail.

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I wrote nearly 1300 words about this and that is a true testament to how angry this stage made me. The good news for you is that if you read all of this, it probably took you about 1/10 the amount of time that it took me to finally get past this horribly designed stage.

It's still a great game though, and I would recommend that anyone get it, unless you are playing on PS5. You WILL get as frustrated as I did, I guaran-damn-tee it.