Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Review - A Plague of Blade and Shadow
“I dropped my coin… that’s bad luck, you know.”
These words are uttered not too deep into exploration of Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. They come at the end of some dialogue between the player character, Sophia, and a close friend, Leni, and serve as a dramatic full-stop. The delivery – in French, at least; The Plague Tale games give the option to play in the developer, Asobo’s, native tongue – conveys such a troubled emotional tremor that the player likely doesn’t need to be familiar with the previous games to know that this may be foreshadowing. Things are unlikely to get better.
For how long can the outlook on this little island that they’ve sailed off to be optimistic, anyway?
Things were solemn enough by this point. The fuller narrative begins with Sophia held captive in a convent during childhood, the nuns there running experiments on her, needle upon needle corrupting her forearm in order to force the illustration of supernatural visions. Eventually, she is rescued by her father, Catholic blood spilled against cold stone walls, and this act of heroism likely painted him as an invincible hero in her eyes. Until, one day not too far removed, it turns out that he wasn’t.
Resonance serves as a kind-of prequel for two previous Plague Tale games – Innocence and Requiem – that focused instead on two young siblings living through a vermin-carried plague in medieval France, their gameplay largely anchored around stealth, with the occasional moment of bloody catharsis that would ultimately serve to make things worse. They are slow, occasionally meditative, and decidedly not happy games that manage to keep, if not their heads, then at least their toes dipped in the arthouse. Resonance kicks off over a decade before (and a stretch of Europe away from) the beginning of those games. 14th century Italy, to be specific. The connective tissue is the tone of this shared wider world, and the simple fact that an older Sophia first appeared in Requiem.
I didn’t see a single rat in Resonance. Sophia’s nightmare is very much her own.
But before she fully dives into it, she will explore exotic locals, operate ancient machinery, jump wide chasms and climb fantastic heights. Where the original games felt rooted in French cinema with judicious sprinklings of experimental anime, Resonance’s cinematic vibes are somewhat tethered, instead, to the likes of Indiana Jones and The Mummy. Still, unlike some games, it at least pays lip-service to the concept of upper-body strength.
Appropriately, then, Sophia is more in line with what may be expected from a videogame protagonist. While much of the tutorial sees players control her as a small child not so long after her rescue, excitedly rushing to the town pier only to learn of her father’s fate, this is used to motivate her skillset. She is loved and taken in by her communal family, and so we swiftly shift to her training in combat and transition to young womanhood.
While previous Plague Tale games emphasised creeping around unnoticed and using a slingshot as a means of distraction as much as of attack, Sophia swaps slings and stones out for swords and daggers. Stealth isn’t entirely absent, but is a less frequent concern; at least, until Leni loses her lucky coin. It turns out that only dealing with the odd handful of soldiers was the good luck.
Despite being new to the series, the combat itself is excellent. Attack commands are snappy and feel legitimately ferocious, sparks fly on counters, and the outcome of who lives and dies is decided swiftly.
Resonance was reviewed on PC, and as such we can’t give a final word on console performance. That being said, the system requirements are pleasingly accessible to the point where it is reasonable to expect this one will shine on current gen TV-boxes. This may be in part because Asobo clearly hasn’t fallen back into using UE5, and the technology that the team has employed makes smart use of established features. Considering that the very first Plague Tale, released pre-pandemic, still looks impressive, it is reasonable to expect that Resonance will age exceptionally well for a title that aims in the direction of visual realism.
This is in large part because Resonance is very effective at encouraging aggression. Sophia is limited to a small health bar (three hits, on normal difficulty) which can vanish with startling speed if you let your attention lapse, especially as there is no timed regeneration and no restorative items, either on the field of battle or tucked away in an inventory. Rather, Asobo has opted for a system wherein each kill rejuvenates health. This is then compounded by rewarding properly timed parries with easier openings for more devastating blows.
Perhaps most impressive of all is how well Requiem eschews the need for any kind of lock-on system; Sophia will lash out at the target of choice by simple virtue of where she’s facing. The payoff is a bloody dance of steel and environmental awareness, as a chance to kick a grunt of a ledge not only thins the field, but also allows for Sophia to recover from a hit. Never mind the smart use of throwables and the rope that was probably brought along mostly for the aforementioned climbing of fantastic heights.
While a success on its own merits, this swordplay is nonetheless a departure from a part of the series’ identity. Considering the tone of bleakness that serves as the real bedrock here, the concern is that deploying a more brutal, direct combat system could dilute this, or even create a sense of dissonance as Sophia eventually takes tens, if not hundreds of lives over the course of the roughly fifteen-hour adventure. With this in mind, the French-language voiceover may prove borderline essential: there is a ferocity and desperation to Sophia’s shrieks in – and increasing in-between – the field of battle, a mad anger that almost carries and restores the series’ darker themes all by itself.
This doesn’t fully release Resonance from the push-and-pull tension between the artistic and blockbuster priorities that underpin this direction, but there is a level of craft to the execution that should at least serve as a reminder that craftsmanship is hardly a derogative. Resonance has incorporated a close-quarters combat system that feels sharp and vicious, and never chewy. There is one point late game where it threatens to use waves of combat as a crutch, before brilliantly finding a way to cut it short, practically winking at the player as the pacing rights itself.
Considering developer Asobo’s legacy, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that Resonance is a showpiece. Played on a capable PC, texture information is immaculate and detail dense. The target here is a slightly grubby, lived-in realism that can nonetheless reach for moments of sunny and mystical beauty, and it largely hits. Closer inspection can reveal some limits – things like fabrics, in particular, do little to differentiate themselves –, but there is payoff where closer attention has been paid with some excellent skin tones and some fantastically expressive eyes that even manage to communicate tears kept at bay.
This visual splendor is paired with a soundtrack that matches bright strings with more dramatic choirs and plenty of deep bass rumble as things progress, literally shifting tone from bright to foreboding.
It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the structure of this adventure is built around light and dark, with the occasional cipher on the side. Things begin in earnest following a journal left by Sophia’s late father, smartly employing cryptic-but-not-really clues for the player to follow at the press of a button before shadowy puzzle chambers, often lovingly lit by fantastical glowing blue footprints, take up increasingly meaningful chunks of time. By the end of it all, these rooms are basically interconnected and Sophia will have arguably used as many stone mirrors to reflect beams of light to solve puzzles as she has felled men hunting her.
Let not the increasing grandeur of these hallways and buried chambers go unstated. There is a scale and craft to each of these rooms that would make even the most embellished textbook images of ancient Greek splendor feel meek. The trials and traps presented here shouldn’t be thought about too hard, lest their true absurdity cut through the growing darkness.
Likewise, there is an inherent silliness to the armed meat-sacks that keep on getting in Sophia’s way. Early on in the game, she acquires a key mcguffin in the form of an ancient sphere; a multi-functioned key and device that is frequently essential to progressing through the challenges on this island. And yet, those seeking to claim it from her cold hands are, somehow, frequently ahead of her. On occasion, Resonance has the decency to explode or crumble a wall to provide at least some don’t-think-too-hard-about-it reasoning.
I played the previous Plague Tale games in French, which made perfect sense owing to the setting. This got a bit more complicated here, as this story starts in Italy and teases at the Greek roots of Sophia’s name, but neither Italian or Greek get an inclusion in the spoken language option. I ultimately stuck with French as this is what is native to the developers, and likely informs the basic structures of dialogue and plotting, although I do appreciate that subtitles are harder to follow in gameplay than during a movie and that it’s probably no less silly to have ancient Italians speaking English.
Some of this absurdity is, almost ironically, made more digestible by the shadowy secret that underpins what everyone is searching for on this island. These chambers had to be built by an ancient society, and the experiments put upon a young Sophia have unlocked a mysterious connection that aids her understanding of how it eventually flew too close to the sun and crumbled. It’s more pure curse than plague this time around, but the underpinning monstrosity is still a dark corruption with the power to calcify entire civilisations.
And so, as the bleaching of sunlight is increasingly replaced by dark, groaning underground dwellings, Sophia herself will occasionally become as the rat in a maze: hunted, scurrying between lamps that somehow still manage to emit light thousands of years since their creators turned to dust. The glowing blue trails that once served as a fun, almost delightfully mystical visual flourish during the first forays into the dark are brilliantly recast as markers for shadow-dwelling monstrosities to sniff out, a clever crossroad of narrative and gameplay that aids in both moments of measured sneaking of chest-bursting chase set pieces.
It cumulates largely as expected, turning down increasingly dark chambers and hallways, allegiances shifting, walls crumbling, one-on-one duels settling grievances. For all of its sombre tone, Resonance is still chained to the lexicon of game design: skill trees, colour-coded ledges, side paths leading to currency for upgrades. In line with this, the bang it ends on may be a little predictable, but the mechanical execution nonetheless retains merit.
As secrets are brought to light, Resonance manages to more tightly fuse itself to the thematics of the games that came before. The final output is an oddball that struggles even harder to straddle the line between product and art; a creative vision from another land trying to find its feet in the gaming analogue of Hollywood, making concessions to focus tests and market research while still struggling to grip tightly enough to a core essence as to remain true to itself. The craftsmanship here is impressive, and the two halves have fused well together. As such, both are cromulent, but neither can quite shine as an absolute triumph.
A compromised triumph, then. Asobo’s luck hasn’t run out just yet: the gamble has still resulted in a pretty damn good video game.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy was reviewed on PC with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
