We show that random walk on the incipient infinite cluster (IIC) of two-dimensional critical percolation is subdiffusive in the chemical distance (i.e., in the intrinsic graph metric). Kesten (1986) famously showed that this is true for the Euclidean distance, but it is known that the chemical distance is typically asymptotically larger. More generally, we show that subdiffusivity in the chemical distance holds for stationary random graphs of polynomial volume growth, as long as there is a multi-scale way of covering the graph so that "deep patches" have "thin backbones". Our estimates are quantitative and give explicit bounds in terms of the one and two-arm exponents $η_2 > η_1 > 0$: For $d$-dimensional models, the mean chemical displacement after $T$ steps of random walk scales asymptotically slower than $T^{1/β}$, whenever \[ β< 2 + \frac{η_2-η_1}{d-η_1}\,. \] Using the conjectured values of $η_2 = η_1 + 1/4$ and $η_1 = 5/48$ for 2D lattices, the latter quantity is $2+12/91$.