Surprise of the year?
By Ameer Ammar
Resonance is a game that I honestly had no expectations for, it has mostly gone under the radar with not much discussion around it leading up to launch but I am very happy to report Asobo has done a fantastic job with this game, and delivered a plunderer tale that feels far more Uncharted and Tomb Raider than it does the two previous Plague Tale games.
Resonance is a prequel to the Plague Tale series, about 15-20 hour in length, exploring the origins of Sophia, a recurring character from Requiem. It takes place 15 years before the events with Amicia & Hugo from the previous games and explores her origins as a plunderer and her adventure on Minotaur Island. Sophia is haunted by visions from the bronze age of Minotaur Island, and she seeks to uncover its mysteries and treasures.
Resonance has a huge focus on puzzle solving and exploration, with much of the game feeling like a direct homage to Uncharted and Tomb Raider. It does not feel like the previous Plague Tale games and has a generally very fun adventure energy to the whole thing. Puzzles range from challenging to fairly straight forward, Sophia even carries a notebook to keep track of all puzzles just like Nate from Uncharted. It carries its inspirations proudly and most of my favorite sections were when the game drops you in a more wide open area, and you have to track clues to ancient ruins then solve puzzles leading to a combat section.
Resonance plays completely differently from the previous two Plague Tale games, while those games were almost entirely stealth games with no melee combat, Resonance introduces the series’ first dedicated melee combat system and this is a combat system that ended up really impressing me. It takes inspiration from Sekiro and combines that with Ghost of Tsushima style system. It is heavily focused on breaking postures through exploiting each parrying or exploiting specific defenses. For example, shield enemies’ posture can be broken by kicking while for brutes, dodging and then attacking is the best strategy. For others, parrying at the perfect moment is the only way to break their posture. This is a deeply satisfying combat system that offers quite a lot of challenge at higher difficulties, especially in big group battles. It feels great, snappy and with awesome finishers including some environmental specific ones. I was very happily surprised at how Asobo nailed their first melee combat system here and I think this is an addition that overall needs to stay with the franchise going forward.
Stealth is here but it’s done very differently from the previous games and to avoid spoilers, I don’t want to give out much details aside from its very unique and very fun to experience how they managed to introduce stealth sections in this game while keeping the general power fantasy of being a trained plunderer like Sophia.
The story is always the highlight of these Plague Tale games and its no different for this one, Sophia’s journey begins by exploring her relationships and origins from a very young age as she is haunted by visions of this island and its inhabitants. Sophia’s relationship with her father, her mentors and her friends are done so incredibly well and fantastically performed by every single actor here. Faro is one character who's a huge standout, a character whose motivations are rarely clear and always leave you second guessing. Ben Homewood as Faro and Anna Demetriou deserve all the praise here for their performances as Faro and Sophia, every single scene with these two characters had me glued to the screen. The one aspect where I felt the story faltered is Sophia’s relationship with her partner Leni. While all the other major relationships are explored in-depth in the prologue, Leni feels like a character that comes out of nowhere and how Sophia came to be so close with this person is never really made clear. In such a fantastic script, Leni is the only character that felt strangely out of place and almost existed solely so that Sophia wouldn’t spend too much of the game alone. Aside from this one character, every single friendship and rivalry, every emotion that Sophia goes through are well-developed and genuinely compelling. The other side of the story is the bronze age plot with Theseus and the origin of Minotaur Island. This is the side to the story that I fell in love with, it has so many twists, big reveals and wild turns that every single flashback was beyond exciting to get through. One of my favorite parts was seeing how these same places from thousands of years ago compare to how they look in the story’s present day. It’s actually one of the smartest ways I’ve seen to show how bronze age architecture exactly changed with time.
As much praise as I have for this game, I really think the biggest issue here is pacing. Particularly in the final quarter with chapters 11-12-13, where it really feels like the gameplay starts to grind to a halt as it gets repetitive and runs out of new ideas to introduce. While the story writing stays consistently extremely strong, the other 75% of the game is constantly introducing new gameplay ideas and twists, the last quarter really struggles at giving truly new. There’s a certain puzzle that felt like it was repeated 3+ times in one of the last chapters with only small variations in-between, and a few combat sections that were beyond forced. The problem is that during all this, the story is still at its absolute peak and never falters, I just wished the gameplay managed to keep up. It’s just a situation of a game overstaying its welcome, and it really messes with the pacing of the story as these gameplay sections being so dragged out goes against the urgency of the narrative. Thankfully, the ending is very satisfying and is worth getting through some level of tedium to experience how it wraps up.
The soundtrack composed by Olivier Deriviere is an absolute masterpiece, the music carries the emotion in every single cutscene, big story moment and there is constant beautiful music while exploring. I have been a fan of Olivier’s work since Dying Light 2 and this is his best work yet. It is a truly beautiful soundtrack that is just pleasing to listen to and stands out heavily throughout the game.
Resonance runs on the Zouna Engine and is a beautiful game, the screenshots speak for themselves as Asobo has always made gorgeous games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and the previous Plague Tale games. The cutscenes and facial animations in specific are incredible and full of emotion. The only issue I had with the presentation is that there are a couple cutscenes where the lip-syncing is off, I thought this was especially noticeable at the end of Chapter 5. I played on the PS5 Pro and there is a strange bug where every time you boot up the game, you have to change the upscaling setting from TAA to PSSR, this makes a huge difference in clarity and I highly recommend doing this every time if you’re on this platform. Also, Resonance does ship with a performance mode. Something that they missed with Requiem and on PS5 Pro I only experienced FPS drops at a few sections, with the game holding 60FPS for almost its entirety.
FINAL VERDICT
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is the biggest surprise of the year for me so far, I had no real expectations so I was very happy that it is a truly compelling and emotional story-heavy game that feels takes inspiration from some of my favorite story games such as Uncharted and Tomb Raider and combining that with the DNA of the previous Plague Tale games.
With fun puzzles, a strong gameplay loop and a fantastic soundtrack. It’s main flaws being pacing issues around the last quarter and one particular story character that felt out of place, I came out of the game having thoroughly enjoyed it and I very much cannot wait to see what Asobo cooks next with this franchise.
RESONANCE: A PLAGUE TALE LEGACY - 8.5/10 - GREAT
Special thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy