Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy rewards players who do the necessary prep work

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy has a tough tightrope to walk. Can it step away from the series' signature swarms of rats and still deliver supernatural horror that pairs with satisfying environmental puzzles? Can it drop the sibling leads and still tell a touching story about two people learning to depend on each other? And can it bolt on fast, ferocious combat as a new pillar without losing its identity as a puzzle game? At times Resonance pulls it off—particularly in its stronger first half—but it stumbles far too often. And as it drifts further off course, it moves away from what made the first two A Plague Tale games work so well without adding anything to fill the gap.

Set in 1334, roughly 15 years before the first two A Plague Tale games, Resonance follows Sophia rather than series lead Amicia de Rune. As a child, Sophia was forcibly injected with blood that gives her visions of a long-lost civilization. Hoping to cure her, her father eventually finds and travels to the island she has seen in those visions—but while trying to uncover its history, he is killed by a mysterious and terrifying beast. Wanting to understand her visions and learn what really happened to her father, Sophia heads to the island with her best friend Leni.

The story, especially early on, is very good. This series has always excelled at quickly building up characters or situations in its openings as narrative investments meant to be destroyed or torn away early, creating emotional stakes: Amicia's happy family life in the first game, the hope that her life had regained some normalcy in the second. Resonance does the same. You spend a good amount of time getting to know Sophia in Europe and the fairly happy life she has with the adopted family of smugglers who raised her before a tragedy forces her to the island. There's a real desperation in her tale, and the stakes—what might happen to her or Leni if she returns to her allies empty-handed and without answers—are abundantly clear.

Leni and Sophia have an odd dynamic. Narratively, it works well. There's some angst beneath the friends' playful banter that hints at romantic feelings pulling them together, and the two play off each other beautifully in cutscenes thanks to their very different skill sets—Sophia is a fighter who can muscle through problems that require strength, and Leni is a pickpocket skilled at getting in and out of places she doesn't belong.

But that never shows up in the gameplay. Leni can hold her own in a fight just as well as Sophia (she even one-shots whichever enemy she's dealing with once you handle the second-to-last foe) and regularly helps push open heavy doors and move partially stuck levers. At the same time, Sophia can squeeze into any spot Leni can and usually leads on how to solve puzzles (because she's you, the player!). The story does a great job framing that these two only succeed because they have each other, but that framing is repeatedly undercut whenever a cutscene ends and control returns to you. It all feels very odd, like Resonance is clinging to its partnership framing for no other reason than that the first two games used it.

The mysterious, newly discovered island Sophia and Leni find themselves on is quickly revealed to be Crete, once home to Minoan society and—if the myths are to be believed—a minotaur-inhabited labyrinth. The characters don't know that; it's 1334, so all those stories have yet to be rediscovered.

That's a terrific framing for a puzzle game. As Sophia, you carry a book filled with drawings from your childhood visions, your father's early attempts to explore the island, and all the follow-up expeditions the smuggling gang undertook after his death. There's no writing—just a series of drawings. Using those drawings, you have to figure out how to retrace the steps of those who came before, while also finding your own way forward when unexpected roadblocks appear.

To aid their exploration, Sophia possesses an artifact dating back to the Minoan society that once lived on the island. The sphere can redirect light to reveal hidden symbols left behind with invisible paint, and also open doorways that require lining up beams of light to hit certain points on a wall. These light-based puzzles are rarely complicated, but they contribute to the feeling of Sophia and Leni as intelligent dungeon delvers uncovering long-lost history.

The process feels like what I imagine archaeology to be—I don't believe Sophia's journey is in any way accurate to uncovering forgotten ruins and unraveling ancient mysteries, but the idealized fantasy of it is well represented here.

Crete is also a beautiful place to explore. The island is brightly lit and full of vibrant greens, reds, and blues, while the faded bronze of statues, broken weapons, and simple machinery mark Minoan society. Resonance also has the best soundtrack of the series, sticking to strings to frame most of Sophia's journey as a grand adventure or odyssey, and crucially plucking at the tension once the supernatural terror begins to rear its head.

It takes Resonance longer than any other A Plague Tale game to reveal its monster, but once it does, any semblance that this will be a fun couples adventure for Sophia and Leni is gone. The beast is creepy, slinking through the darkness of the island's underbelly in search of any and all life. In these darkened areas, Sophia becomes covered in softly glowing blue lights, and she leaves a trail of luminescent tracks whenever she's not crouch-walking. The beast can use these trails to track her, but it also will pause to take a hauntingly raspy sniff of the air—if Sophia is not behind cover when this happens, the beast will sniff out the blue lights on her and pursue her. The beast's only weakness is light. It burns away upon touching any light source, so encounters with the beast are a series of tense stealth sections as you bravely venture into the dark to reach the next source of light.

These sections are terrifying, especially the first one as the beast is introduced and you finally get to see what killed Sophia's father. These moments stay pretty consistently creepy too, with the sound design of the beast's methodical movements and desperate breathing creating a tense and frantic atmosphere whenever it shows up. And Resonance continues to raise the bar with each encounter, adding new types of obstacles to consider (like how to find safety in areas where the beast can dim the light, or there's no light whatsoever) and more types of enemy terrors for Sophia to encounter in the dark. It's certainly the most memorable take I've ever seen of Crete's infamous minotaur.

Figuring out what the beast is and its motivations becomes the biggest driving mystery of Resonance. As Sophia ventures closer to the minotaur's lair, she encounters more and more that is unfamiliar to her but very much understood for us as the player, but the game's reframing of these long-familiar myths is an enticing draw. Sophia soon starts having visions of being Theseus, the Greek hero who we know slayed the minotaur, but their story feels quite different from the tale we know. They don't seem to be a divine adventurer, but are instead a gladiator who rose to fame by participating in some sort of competition; and they have a secret agreement with Daedalus, the famed inventor of the labyrinth.

These visions are beautiful, reimagining what Minoan society might have looked like at the height of the Bronze Age. They're also wonderful power fantasies as Theseus is a far stronger warrior than Sophia.

Combat is merely fine in Resonance. Sophia can strike, block, dodge, and parry, and also has a grappling hook to grab and yank enemies toward her. The soldiers that followed Sophia and Leni to the island come in your typical variety of standard, nimble, shield-bearing, spear-wielding, and heavy enemy types, each of which has a singular tried-and-true method of taking them down. The challenge of combat comes down to crowd management, ducking and weaving and parrying long enough for an opening to present itself. Sophia (and Theseus) can take two hits before the third kills them, and health is only regained by executing an enemy, encouraging you to fight aggressively and end conflicts swiftly or to keep a weaker enemy alive for an easy stab-and-heal while whittling away at a much stronger foe.

These brief and violent dances are a fun break from the puzzle-solving in the first half of the game, but in the latter half—especially the final few hours—Resonance starts throwing huge groups of enemies at you, and that's when the combat system falls apart. Resonance doesn't have a lock-on feature, so dealing with especially large groups of enemies clumped together is a pain, and I found myself frustratingly dying often because I was trying to attack a specific enemy I had just stunned, only for Sophia to wail against the impenetrable shield of a healthy target instead.

The ending of Resonance is also just far weaker than the first half. Sofia either travels alone or with a far less interesting NPC. The decision to have her travel solo I can understand—it ups the tension during moments when the beast is hunting Sophia, and also ensures that those tense moments aren't ruined by the companion messing up and breaking stealth. That would have probably sucked. But Sophia's other companion is a poor tradeoff for moments when Leni isn't there—the game does such a good job of villainizing this other character up to that point in the story, that for Sophia to then be forced to work with them for several chapters feels off-putting.

The decision to make Sophia travel with a companion at all, again, feels like the lingering ghost of the older games dictating what the formula needs to be. The moments where Sophia is traveling solo clearly showcase that she can carry a game on her own, but if we had to have her talk out loud to someone else to progress the story, I'm baffled that the dev team didn't go for the far more intriguing choice of somehow making the ghost of Theseus work.

Resonance also starts going a little too far into the physical trauma porn in the end, even giving Lara Croft from the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy a run for her money. There comes a point where seeing a character survive getting tossed around, beaten, and bloodied makes you start to wonder if the character is superhuman. When that occurs, the fantasy of this being a story of an ordinary woman grappling with the ramifications of discovering a supernatural power begins to crack, and you stop worrying about a protagonist once you've seen them survive a near-death experience half a dozen times.

Perhaps worst of all, the final moments of Resonance have a lore problem. If you've played these games, you'll be able to start piecing together what's going on in the latter half of the story, and the final big reveal will ultimately hit you like a freight train. If you know the ramifications of Resonance's mystery and absolutely awesome conclusion, it might be the best finale in the series. But if you have no idea what, as an example, the Prima Macula is, the last five hours of this game's story will make very little sense to you and the finale will probably be a confusing dud. You'll still get the emotional payoff of Sophia having acquired the answers she was seeking, but the game doesn't provide the necessary context to fully understand what those answers mean.

So, as strange as it i

Source: the original publisher