I’ve never mastered the combat of Sekiro and Sifu. They’re games that demand you recognise an incoming attack and match it with millisecond perfect parries and dodges. Success sees you turn a foe’s assaults against them, ducking under their swinging blade and popping up behind them to deliver a precise punch to their kidney; failure sees you knocked to the ground or cut in two. So it’s not great news for me that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy has dropped its stealth roots in favour of combat inspired by the most exacting third-person melee games.
Thankfully, protagonist Sophia fights dirty.
You may know Sophia from Plague Tale: Requiem, where she was a pirate whose ship and services protagonists Amicia and Hugo used to escape the soldiers pursuing them across Provence. Set in 1333, Resonance tells the story of how Sophia became the pirate you meet 16 years later in Requiem.
The preview of Resonance I’m playing drops me into the game’s fourth mission. Sophia has travelled to an island off the shores of Crete in search of a group of missing plunderers. Though, she’s not alone. From the top of a cliff, I see ships loaded with Venetian soldiers landing on the golden beaches below. “Find that sphere. Find the treasure. Kill anyone that’s ahead of us,” a captain shouts. Developers Asobo Studio haven’t told me much about what’s going on at this point in Resonance’s story, but judging by the metal ball hanging from Sophia’s hip, I might have what the soldiers want.
Sophia’s come to the island with Leni, a companion who offers just enough dialogue to let you know she’s there, but not so much as to become a pest. The two keep out of sight of the soldiers on the beach and track the previous plunderers’ route to discover the grand entrance to an ancient temple. Soldiers on a bridge below are hammering at the structure’s vast front door with a battering ram, but we can use a ledge to reach a hidden entrance. Everything is going to plan until the ledge crumbles under Sophia’s feet and sends her sliding down a slope and deposits me right at the soldiers’ feet.
Outnumbering me five to one, and armed with swords and spears, the troops can kill me in only a few hits. In the brief combat tutorial ahead of my preview, I learned I’m bad at timing both parrying and dodging, so I’m primed to be cut to shribbons. That’s when I see the prompt to kick with the ‘Y’ button. I tap it and hoof one of the soldiers off the bridge’s edge. They plunge into the depths below, uttering a brief yelp as they go. Now only four against one. (Technically two: Leni does join into the fight, but from the sidelines so it never feels like she’s killing enemies on my behalf.)
The kick isn’t only for launching unwary warriors off ledges, you can knock enemies into one another, leaving both staggered and open for a finishing slash from your sword. (Three against one.) Or you can kick them into anything solid around the environment – crates, walls, pillars – and leave them dazed and vulnerable. (two against one.) And Sophia has other tools available. An empty bottle rests on top of a crate. I tap the right thumbstick and the plunderer snatches it up and flings it at an enemy, stunning them and opening them up to a finishing move. (One on one.) With the odds evened, I should probably try and master the block and counterattack, but Sophia has another trick up her sleeve. Or, more accurately, on her belt; a grappling hook. I swing it at the final swordsman and yank him towards me, pulling him off balance, and cut him from belly to chin.
While this combat-focused spinoff is a departure from the mainline original Plague Tale games, a protagonist seizing upon any advantage she can means it’s not a misstep for the series. While Amicia swaddled herself in the shadows and used the swarms of rats drawn to her brother Hugo against the French soldiers pursuing her, Sophia also uses everything in the environment to blind and buffet her enemies. As a sheer coincidence of comparison, as I recently previewed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, which updates the original game’s combat in favour of melee also inspired my Sekiro, and offers many of the same fighting tools, including a grappling hook equivalent, where Ubisoft’s game left me feeling clumsy, Resonance makes me feel like a scrappy underdog.
The fight earns me enough ‘Resonance’ to unlock a new skill, either Echo’s Return or Heroic Surge. The former lets me grab attacking enemies and swing them into their enemies, while the latter grants me a temporary shield whenever I kill someone with my charged attack. I plump for the latter because Sophia’s slim health bar doesn’t allow me to survive many direct hits.
Soldiers dispatched, Leni and I enter the temple through its shattered front door and find ourselves in an atrium decorated with bull iconography. It’s just possible that Resonance’s story will touch on Crete’s most famous resident… While the room is ancient, discarded ropes and equipment show the plunderers I’m searching for passed through here. A stone door bars the way but there are two pedestals fitted with dials and marked with strange symbols that match those daubed on the walls of the atrium. Sophia takes out the sphere on her belt and holds it up to a sunbeam breaking through a gap in the old ceiling. The sphere becomes like a blacklight torch, sending a wide beam of light out into the room, revealing glowing blue lines crisscrossing the floor. I can shine the light here and there, tracing the lines between the symbols on the wall and the pedestals, revealing to which marking I should turn the dial. I twist the dials and the stone door barring my way creaks open.
The door leads outside to the mouth of a vast pit carved into the earth. The head of a colossal statue emerges from its mouth, looking just a touch like a Swede stood in a plunge pool. That’s not to do down the artwork of Resonance, the vast statue is a striking image. That’s very much in keeping with the earlier games. I don’t think I’ll ever shake the sequence in Innocence where you cross a battlefield littered with the corpses of soldiers and horses, bloated with rot and swollen to bursting with rats. Then, in Requiem, the team found ways to marry the darkness with beautifully rich colour and light, such as the purple lavender fields and red cloth shades strung between the trees of the pilgrim camp in Provence. From what I’ve seen, Resonance continues the colour and light of Requiem. Though, as I descend into the pit I leave the sun behind and, clearly, this is an early level in the game, so it may tip further into darkness the deeper you get into the story.
In better times, a path corkscrewed down the edge of the pit to its floor, but cave-ins and collapsed masonry have blocked the way. Ropes and ladders left by the plunderers I’m following and the Venetian soldiers who have somehow got ahead of me, let me cross some of the blockages but as I descend I frequently have to leave the path, entering dusty rooms to solve puzzles to progress. Some rooms have me turning mirrors to reflect beams of light to unlock a door, or following a glowing line of safety over a floor littered with pressure plate-triggered spike traps, or tracing a blue thread through a carving of a maze. It’s all very Tomb Raider. That’s not a problem, nor is it exactly new to the Plague Tale games, which have always featured environmental puzzles. Although, in the previous games, they were presented more as an accident of the environment than a trial designed by an in-fiction architect to be solved. So, when you had to cross a cathedral floor swarming with deadly rats in A Plague Tale: Innocence, you were repurposing the candles and chandeliers to drive away the rodents, items that were there for the building’s everyday use, as opposed to solving an ancient puzzle crafted by the temple’s builders. Resonance’s challenges are still enjoyable, but it makes the adventure a little more generic – one where Lara Croft or Nathan Drake could just as happily step in and take Sophia’s place.
At the bottom of the pit, I discover an elevator that takes me to the first sign I’m in a Plague Tale game. I descend into a chamber filled with people frozen in terrified flight, their bodies composed of a mucus-like stone. If this were a game purely spun out of Greek myths, I’d cry Medusa – and that link may be played on in the story – but it has the distinct look of the Macula, the magical rat plague that underpins the first two games. I don’t see a single rat in my time with Resonance, but this room of statues suggests they are still to come.
Though, immediately after this familiar sight you’re thrown into something new to Plague Tale. Sophia pushes through a crack in the rock and as she steps out into an ancient arena, she is overwhelmed by a vision. The empty stands are filled with cheering Greeks, the floor of the arena, previously empty, is now filled with Hoplites, and Sophia inhabits the body of Theban hero Theseus. Above the arena towers a statue of the minotaur. A voice shouts over the sound of the crowd, ordering the soldiers to fight each other – another trial before they can proceed. While similar to Sophia’s moveset, Theseus doesn’t feel scrappy, but formidable. They have a charge attack that lets you carve through enemies. When the combat ends, the vision fades and you return to controlling Sophia in the present. Though she doesn’t come back empty-handed, she gains Theseus’ charge attack.
The level I saw is only a slice of Resonance, carved out from somewhere near the beginning of its story, which by design raises more questions than it answers: what are the visions about? Where are the rats? Will I get to fill the pit with water and thus give the colossus the plunge pool bath it seems made for? But it was also a great deal of fun to play. The puzzles are light, though engaging; the combat challenging, but not overwhelming; and the world’s mysteries are intriguing. Though what I saw might be new for the series, it’s not new to games: it’s many of the same parts and pieces we’ve seen in other third-person games, competently brought together around a new story. That describes many games, I know, and that may be unfair, but I have higher expectations of a Plague Tale game.
“It’s the swarms that steal the show,” Adam wrote of A Plague Tale: Innocence’s reveal back in 2017 – an event I was also at, but I can’t link to my article because it was for Kotaku UK (RIP). “Both as a game mechanic and a technical feat, the rats are king.” The rodents ebbed and flowed like water, they were used to horrific effect both as a device and simply to set the scene of the story. I’ve little doubt the rats will return in Resonance, but until they do, or we see something that is equally unique, Resonance is a fine game, but one that doesn’t leave much of an impression.
Travel and accommodation was paid for by the publisher.
