Perfectly capable, but does this actually feel like a Plague Tale entry?
Ahead of its late August launch, Stevivor was offered the chance to go hands-on with Resonance A Plague Tale Legacy, a prequel to Asobo’s A Plague Tale Innocence and follow-up A Plague Tale Requiem.
Resonance doesn’t star franchise leads Amicia and Hugo de Rune, instead focusing on Sophia, a pirate smuggler who featured in Requiem. Nor does Resonance feature the hideous rat king that makes Plague Tale, well, Plague Tale — at least from the hands-on experience I had. I’ll confess I only played a portion of the sequel — or, as it turns out, I did finish the game but don’t really remember it, nor Sophia — but nevertheless adored Innocence and its extremely unique setting and gameplay loop. That alone puts two small strikes against this prequel.
According to Asobo, Resonance revolves around “Sophia’s journey… to the Minotaur’ Island, where she faces deadly trials, navigates treacherous trails, solves puzzles, all while fighting and staying one step ahead of the army chasing her.”
From my hands-on time, I can attest this is true. Mirroring a gameplay reveal shown above, I first began in an area jam-packed with puzzles and combat encounters. The former were quite fun — in one, I spotted a pattern of tiles in an area before a series of disconnected pedestals; jumping from one to another in the correct order meant survival, and jumping out of sequence meant a horrible, spike-filled death.
The puzzle wasn’t overly intricate, but clever — rather than getting from point A to point B, I quickly realised (and yes, through a bit of trial and error) that I needed to backtrack at some points in order to survive. Points to Asobo for creativity.
Other puzzles are Hellblade-esque in that they centre around a stolen Minoan sphere, and require the player to reflect and refract light to hit certain points in the environment. These spatially-aware puzzles help to break up cerebral challenges.
Combat, however, wasn’t as clever. Rather than being an underpowered child, Sophia is a force to be reckoned with. You don’t need to skulk in the shadows and strike only when the moment is right; instead, you throw yourself headlong into battles in a way that feels rather generic.
Sophia has a standard attack, a charged attack, can parry, dodge, and kick away at the shields of enemies who possess them. From what I played, there wasn’t a terrible need for strategy, just attack and dodge as required. That’s not to say things are bad, per se, just pretty vanilla.
In the end, combat doesn’t feel like A Plague Tale, nor does traversal or puzzles that used to heavily focus on light and dark (and in a way that didn’t need a magical sphere).
I’ve only played a sliver of the final product, but Resonance feels incredibly divorced from the Plague Tale franchise that I think of. I miss strategy and crafting, and feeling powerless; none of those things came up in this prequel.
All up, Resonance seems to be a perfectly capable title, but that’s hardly a glowing recommendation. I’ll get to work at finishing Requiem to see if a stronger connection to Sophia helps with this one, but again, that’s not a great recommendation either.
Resonance A Plague Tale Legacy heads to Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PS5 from 27 August 2026.
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