If you were to ask the average gamer what they knew about the Plague Tale series, you’d probably get a one-word answer: rats. Asobo Studio successfully carved out a niche with its Plague Tale duology, consisting of 2019’s Innocence and 2022’s Requiem, by rooting the series in a compelling set of design pillars. They featured stealth-focused combat, contained emotional storytelling, and — most importantly — gave you the ability to control writhing hordes of murderous rats. With the latest entry in the series, Asobo asks how many of those core pillars it can throw out while still feeling like a Plague Tale game.
There is nary a single rat in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, a new installment that acts as a prequel to the 14th-century series. While it carries the Plague Tale name, so much of the design ethos that makes up the experience bears little resemblance to anything in either Innocence or Requiem. Resonance experiments with new modes of gameplay and narrative to varying success. A pivot towards bland action combat threatens to lose much of what set past Plague Tale games apart in an often homogeneous landscape. Yet even when it stumbles (and it so often does), Resonance resonates thanks to a well-performed narrative that anchors everything. It is a game I can easily recommend as a cinematic journey filled with swashbuckling spectacle; I just don’t know if it’s a good Plague Tale game.
With the story of siblings Amicia and Hugo de Rune concluded in Requiem, Resonance is in want of a new protagonist. It finds it in the form of Sophia (Anna Demetriou), one of Requiem‘s supporting characters. Set fifteen years prior to the rest of the series, Sophia is not yet the weathered smuggler we know she will become. Instead, she is just a young member of a group of plunderers she calls family. Her father used to lead the group until his untimely demise on a mysterious island that Sophia has been plagued by visions of her entire life. Finding the island’s treasure has become the principal mission of the plunderers, now led by a man named Faro (Benjamin Homewood).
Resonance opens with a series of vignettes throughout Sophia’s youth, explaining this setup in more detail, interspersed with the requisite combat tutorials. You can parry, you can dodge, light attack, heavy attack. You’ve probably done this a million times before. Asobo does bring some personality to the formula. Yanking enemies with a grappling hook is just as satisfying as sending them flying off a cliff with a well-placed kick, and both brought a grin to my face. This new action focus of Resonance has been heavily advertised prior to the game’s release and is one of the major departures from its predecessors.
It is also deeply boring. It isn’t that I find the standard parry-dodge style of combat that has become industry standard inherently bad; it’s just far less compelling than what Plague Tale games typically offer. The almost immersive sim stealth mechanics that allowed Amicia to distract guards, snuff out torches, and use rats as a weapon remain singular. Replacing that with a riff on a system dozens of games have done better turned every combat encounter in Resonance into something I dreaded. Not because it was challenging, but because it was a chore.
The importance of combat in Resonance is greatly exaggerated by its introduction. The opening chapters conclude with a mission gone wrong in Venice, after which Sophia and her companion Leni (Lisa Delamar) flee to the mysterious island that has cost so many their lives. Once the pair arrive, swords are sheathed and the two leisurely explore the gorgeous landscape. A journal with notes on past expeditions provides clues on how to enter Minoan ruins, and finding the correct path in these semi-open areas is a delight.
It turns out the island is the place of myth where king Minos trapped the Minotaur in a labyrinth, and Sophia must navigate the same challenges to reach its center. It’s a setup straight out of Uncharted and Tomb Raider. To reinforce the comparison, much of the traversal takes mechanical inspiration from those franchises. That comes in the form of large-scale puzzles that boil down to moving objects around. It is no more original an idea than Resonance‘s combat, but it is executed to greater success. I’d take ten of Resonance‘s light puzzles over a single fight. And fighting does rear its head again as Sophia progresses through the labyrinth.
Resonance treats combat and exploration as distinct modes of play that shall never overlap. A room with a puzzle will almost never be interrupted by combat and a combat encounter will not offer exploration opportunities. You can feel Resonance flip the proverbial switches as you progress, making for a choppy and stilted flow. Even stranger, Resonance does eventually introduce stealth sections that require Sophia to sneak past rooms of enemies that react to sound. These still fail to evoke the game’s predecessors, as Sophia only has one way to deal with these encounters. Stealth was just one tool in Amicia’s tool kit to tackle complex levels that encouraged player freedom. For Sophia, stealth is just as constricting as any other system in Resonance.
Should I also count the classic “run away from a monster chasing you through an obstacle course” segments as a fourth mode? Why not? At least these were also present in Innocence and Requiem. These ideas, and even their execution, are not inherently uninspired, but Plague Tale games typically have such well-designed mechanics that dovetail throughout the experience.
Far more interesting is how Resonance plays with time. Sophia’s visions worsen on the island. She witnesses memories of a soldier named Theseus who takes on Minos’ trials during the island’s heyday. Unraveling what happened to the island’s civilization is a fascinating story of its own, and the eventual connection it reveals to Sophia in the present day is appropriately satisfying. Flashback sequences are also timed perfectly, always arriving just when you need a break from the loop of puzzle, combat, stealth, repeat. That isn’t to say the flashbacks offer new wrinkles to Resonance‘s gameplay — they don’t. Theseus will still swing a sword and swivel light fixtures to solve puzzles. But the visual switch between the past and Sophia’s present is enough to revitalize the experience when it threatens to lean into monotony.
That’s because Asobo Studio is really flexing its muscles in the design of the island and the labyrinth’s depths. Studios that make photorealistic games can too often forget the importance of set design and scene composition, Asobo never does. Sophia’s version of the island balances the beauty of nature with the creeping horror of ruins that feel more and more like tombs. Theseus’s sequences undo the passage of time, showing Minos’s kingdom in all of its blinding glory. Temples with high ceilings and open air courtyards with walls full of colorful frescos. There are also a handful of scenes that use space and perspective in such breathtaking ways that they are still burned in my mind, such as one with a hulking Minotaur statue draped in ropes of light illuminating a cavern.
Pretty environments aren’t enough on their own to make Resonance memorable. Without a story to fill the space, the island is just a container for the game’s repetitive modes of play. But the one core pillar of the Plague Tale series that Resonance retains is the focus on emotional storytelling, and it might just be the only thing it needed to live up to its predecessors. Sophia’s literal descent into the island, and the mental descent that accompanies it, is delivered with such vigor at every turn by Demetriou. It’s hard to look away from her struggle to keep it together, because Demetriou is so hypnotic in how she brings Sophia’s ever-present grief to life. Quiet moments, in which Sophia breaks down and grapples with just how much tragedy she is being confronted with, feel personal, as if occurring in a small theater where you are just feet away from the actor and the electricity between audience and performer is buzzing.
Asobo pulls grounded and affecting performances out of every member of the game’s small supporting cast. Delamar imbues Leni with a sense of adventure and hope that balances out Sophia, making her the personification of every rare moment of joy in Resonance. I do wish Asobo would be less evasive about Leni and Sophia’s relationship, which is clearly romantic even if the game stops just short of saying it outright.
It’s Homewood’s Faro, however, that may be the true breakout of Resonance. After the opening, Faro quickly comes into conflict with Sophia and at first it seems like he’ll be reduced to a forgettable antagonist. The strained relationship between adoptive daughter and father figure is teased out over the rest of the game in what becomes the heart of Resonance‘s story. It could have so easily turned formulaic, but Resonance gives Faro room to grow and change in unexpected ways. This only works as well as it does thanks to Homewood’s haunting performance. He depicts Faro as a man weighed down by the responsibility of a leadership he never wanted, having been thrust into the role following the death of Sophia’s father. That tragedy also turned him into an overprotective parent of Sophia. Much like her, Faro seems to be in a state of constant mourning for those he has lost and those he fears he is yet to lose.
When Resonance invests in the personal stakes of its cast, rather than loose connections to established series lore, it shines. This, when taken in tandem with the messy hodgepodge of gameplay systems, highlights the confounding identity crisis of the game. Asobo Studio can’t decide if it wants to be for fans of the series or for newcomers. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy isn’t truly a Plague Tale game. It is a satisfying action-adventure game elevated by amazing performances that scratches the same itch as Uncharted. In that context, I recommend it wholeheartedly. But I can’t help but worry about what it means for the future of Plague Tale, a once unique series now nothing more than an imitation of something else.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy will be released Aug. 27 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Focus Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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