For a series about light and dark, it’s appropriate that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a spinoff that’s trying to escape the main entries’ shadow. Developer Asobo Studio have dropped much that is familiar to explore exactly what a Plague Tale story can be.
Resonance doesn’t feature series protagonists Amicia and Hugo. It is set 16 years before the events of the last game, long before the siblings flee across wartorn medieval France, hunted by the soldiers of the Inquisition. In Resonance, you play Sophia and see how she became the woman who saves Amicia in A Plague Tale: Requiem. You learn how, as a child, she was kidnapped by the Inquisition and injected with a poison that gave her visions of a strange island. How her father, the leader of a group of smugglers, found the island and died there searching for treasure and a cure to Sophia’s dreams. And how Faro, her father’s successor, continues visiting the island, seeking to unearth its secrets.
Resonance’s early chapters see a now teenage Sophia growing frustrated with Faro. The smuggler leader never takes her with him to the island, despite – and because of – the mounting casualties in the expeditions. Guiltridden, Sophia stops sharing her visions. Those chapters also teach you Resonance’s focus: combat.
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The previous Plague Tale games saw you avoid fights at every opportunity, using stealth and guile to sidestep or ambush your enemies. Not here. As Sophia grows up, she is trained by the smugglers to wield a sword and knife. She parries, dodges, and finishes her enemies. As I found back in April, she fights with a scrappy style, allowing you to pick up bottles and knives from the environment, flinging them at your enemies to break their combos and stun them, leaving them open to attacks. She also has a powerful kick, which you can use to boot enemies into one another or hoof them over ledges. For a studio with no experience of making melee games, Asobo’s done an excellent job of defining a characterful fighting style.
After years of trying to access the island’s deeper secrets, Faro and his explorers realise they can only advance if they can find a ‘key’ – an orb they’ve seen depicted in paintings on the island. He learns that this device is being held in Venice and, after mounting a heist – which I won’t go too deeply into – Sophia finds herself on the island with her friend, Leni, key in hand and with a very pissed off Venetian army in tow.
In Resonance, your aim is to get to the centre of the island before the army catches up with you.
Over the course of a largely enjoyable 12 hours, you will unwind the island’s secrets, learning why it is filled with trial chambers and puzzles, maze iconography, and statues of a half-man, half-bull creature. You will also learn why Sophia keeps having visions of a warrior called Theseus.
However, for all their efforts to build an environment worthy of investigation, Asobo haven’t managed to avoid the pitfalls of the linear action games they follow in the wake of. At its best, Resonance is like a rollercoaster. There is the main path, along which all its set pieces happen. If you stick to the path you will run into fights, scrape through collapsing masonry by the skin of your teeth, and see gorgeous vistas just as something exciting happens in the background. Stick to the path and the world is all motion and energy, but leave it for a moment and it can become static and artificial.
If you don’t see the signposting to turn left as you run through a collapsing temple Indiana Jones-style, you will instead see an animation of Sophia falling to her death. You’ll then restart ten seconds before your death, and have to run the whole thing again. If you still haven’t worked out the signposting then, again, you fall to your death.
These reversals stamp out any desire to deviate from the path, even when it isn’t a matter of life and death. In any case, so little happens off of the ordained path that it feels wrong to go exploring. Even if it doesn’t end up with you awkwardly stumbling over a ledge and falling to your death, or slipping into some water and drowning, you often end up just seeing the world in its unexciting static state.
Asobo do try to encourage exploration. Rather than gain skill points in combat, you find Resonance points hidden in the environment. Horde enough of them and you can learn a super kick, or a double dodge, or a charged up stab. There are also artifacts that give you passive buffs, like a chance for an increased parry window or even a chance to survive a killing blow. But these abilities aren’t essential and picking over the environment is so often fruitless that it feels at odds with the momentum of the main path.
The focus on combat also throws a spanner into the narrative. A significant part of Sophia’s story is that, without her visions or the key she steals on Venice, the smugglers can’t progress through the island. Yet, throughout the game, no matter how deeply you explore the island, after solving a puzzle and opening a locked door that’s dusty with age and inactivity, on the other side you’ll find soldiers waiting for you. Obviously, for a game that’s tipped into combat there needs to be opportunities to fight, but it means the design of many of the levels undermines what you’re being told by the characters.
Back in April, I spoke to lead level designer Valérian Robert about this specifically, and they said in each instance they had worked out how the soldiers had got around the island without keys or visions. Indeed, there is often evidence of ropes and abandoned landing boats. But every time you encounter one it denies the prominence everyone places on Sophia. In one of the game’s final stages, at a point when she truly has progressed beyond where the soldiers can reach, she instead imagines soldiers to fight. You slaughter so many soldiers over the course of the game, I lost all track of their motivation and started to see Sophia as more of a villain.
Finally, Asobo’s boldest decision in Resonance doesn’t pay off: the spinoff features none of the series’ trademark rats. The first two Plague Tale games are good stealth puzzle games elevated by excellent art and strong storytelling, but they are made unique by swarms of rodents that move like water. They pool in the darkness and part ahead of lamplight like lapping waves. I can understand the team wanting to tell different stories in this world and striking out into something new, opting for combat over stealth, and showing off what they can do without resorting to the familiar. Yet, without the rats, Resonance is a much less distinct game than its forebears.
You do face a new enemy in the undercroft of the island, one that preys on you in the dark. But, while ghastly, it just doesn’t capture the same grotesque skincrawling as the rats.
I know this review is coming across negatively, and I don’t mean to suggest Resonance is a bad game. It’s a very competent action game, but in exploring new ground, Asobo have left behind much of what set the series apart from the Tomb Raiders and God of Wars of the genre, games it compares well to but doesn’t equal.