Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy review

Lauren spends most of her time dead in League of Legends, or equally as dead in Valorant. Don’t ask her about Vampire: The Masquerade.

Published: August 26, 2026

Who would you kill to save the world? A friend? A stranger? The one you love? The one you hate? Could you even do it? Could you plunge the dagger in; watch the light fade? That struggle – that humanity – is something that all of Asobo’s Plague Tale games have grappled with. Do the soldiers that hunt you deserve to die, if you’re the reason hundreds are dying? Does it matter if it’s a child that’s carrying the plague, even if they’re innocent? It’s heavy stuff. No, I lie: it’s downright depressing.

If you’ve played A Plague Tale: Requiem, you’ll know that the post-credit cutscene leaves things in an interesting spot – no spoilers here, don’t worry. I’ve been looking forward to that game post-Requiem, avidly watching every showcase, praying that it appears. I can honestly say I was slightly disappointed when I saw Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy; I loved Sophia, but it wasn’t that game that I’ve been waiting for.

I was doubly worried about its action-heavy presentation, which, in many ways, flies in the face of the stealth-focused gameplay we’re used to with Plague Tale. Will we just get another hack-and-slasher without the same narrative gravity? Is there a world where one of my favorite franchises becomes more mainstream and generic? All thoughts that crossed my mind.

I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.

In Resonance, you play as the aforementioned Sophia, a wistful plunderer with impressive combat prowess and a sharp tongue. We start out in her childhood, where a mysterious order of nuns are injecting her with an eerie, black liquid. Said fluid induces visions of a long-forgotten, Grecian-looking island, supposedly home to masses of treasure and the occasional minotaur. Saved by her father and his pirate buddies, the crew immediately goes seeking the island, using Sophia’s hand-drawn, messy notebook as a guide. It goes about as well as you think it does.

Sophia’s father dies mysteriously on the island, and his second-in-command’s obsession with the place means that he’s blind to the fact that the group is slowly being slaughtered. Then, someone betrays them; the Venetian fleet raids the band’s makeshift town, burning it to the ground. Sophia and her partner in crime, Leni, set off to the island, watching as their home burns. It’s immediately obvious this isn’t going to be a happy story, if the ‘Plague Tale’ part hadn’t given that away already.

The island is a mixture of puzzle gameplay and action sequences. Equipped with a spherical key, you’re tasked with realigning mirrors to open doors, exposing invisible ink to search for clues, and playing with various beams of colored light. Puzzles get progressively harder as you venture deeper into the island, and you’ll often have to use Sophia’s notebook to keep track of everything. All in all, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but there are a couple of clever tricks along the way that keep you on your toes.

I’m forced to clear out a troop of petrified humanoids who have, somehow, managed to regain sentience. They’re blocking my path, but seem intent on eating the glowing blue trail that Sophia leaves when she runs through different areas of the island. I sprint, and they immediately shamble towards the gooey blue goodness. I then drop into a crouch, seemingly invisible to them, with the way now clear. It’s a clever trick, and one that’s easy to miss if you haven’t paid attention to the dialog.

The entire theme of the island is its reliance on light to keep the vicious, smog-like monster that haunts the place at bay. Light puzzles make sense, then, but there are an awful lot of them. I spent a lot of time moving and realigning mirrors, and while the puzzles themselves do change, they’re largely variations on a similar theme. Each of the game’s main ‘Trials’ would have been better with fewer puzzles – maybe drop three or four over the course of the whole game. It would have made things feel a little less bloated.

It’s a similar story with the action sequences. I really enjoyed the fluidity of Resonance’s combat; Sophia fights fast and hard, and the ability to toss dropped knives and broken bottles to stun and damage enemies adds some extra dynamism. You can upgrade your abilities using Resonance Points, which are well distributed throughout the levels, and collecting various trinkets and jewelry pieces increases your likelihood of parrying and dodging. It’s a clever system that rewards you for exploring the world (there are some more linear sequences, then bigger, more open areas), and the upgrades really allowed me to hone my unique combat style.

Similarly, the game’s parrying and dodging isn’t particularly punishing, but unblockable attacks can come in thick and fast, and will catch you off guard. There are several late boss fights that I found surprisingly difficult; they’re hardly Elden Ring level, but they do require a bit of pattern recognition and understanding.

It did sometimes feel like Asobo was throwing enemies at you for the sake of it, however. The Trial sequences often became a pattern of mirror puzzle, fight soldiers, repeat, and towards the tail end of the game there were myriad vision sequences that slowed down my progression through the island’s underground Labyrinth. Much like with the puzzles, I feel like the game didn’t need as many combat encounters, and would have felt a little more streamlined without them.

While Resonance diverges from the base Plague Tale games with the action focus, there are some familiar strands here. As you delve deeper beneath the island’s surface, you encounter an eerie, black, mist-like monster, with a huge, Triffid-esque mouth that can effectively suck the life force out of you. It doesn’t like the light, but it does like the aforementioned blue trail that you leave behind you when you walk or run. As a result, you’ll spend a lot of time crouching and stealthing around it a la Requiem and Innocence, with the island’s glowing, fiery beacons giving you some respite.

It’s worth noting that you can’t attack this creature, and it can come from anywhere. A later upgrade to your sphere can help fend it off for a while, but it keeps coming back. This thing – whatever it is – is relentless in its pursuit of death, and if it catches you, you’re forced to run. There’s a cat-and-mouse element to it that I enjoyed; knowing that a single slipup would result in either immediate death, or an Indiana Jones-esque chase sequence that could also end in your untimely demise. Encounters against it are largely slow and methodical; there’s no running screaming from the scary man with a hatchet, just careful character placement and clever terrain management. There’s an overarching sense that this monster is the predator, you are the prey. That, in itself, makes it all the more terrifying, and in many ways, unique.

This sense of fear is amplified by Asobo’s clever use of setting. Resonance is a beautiful game, and its dark, tight spaces feel claustrophobic and hopeless. Sophia coughs as black particles swirl into her lungs; they float gently in the air until they’re disturbed. The aforementioned Petrified, humans who have been claimed by the monster, swarm choke points and hallways, but not all of them can move. I found myself sneaking through every corridor, just waiting for one of them to pounce on me. An eerie click behind me would trigger a squeal, and the randomness with which living Petrified appeared made every situation feel tense. You can’t predict it; they’re always there, watching through ashy eye sockets.

None of this horror feels cheap. While the Plague Tale games do have horror elements (especially if you don’t like rats), Asobo’s approach with Resonance is clever. The weight of the atmosphere – the increasing density of the particles, the darkness – is suffocating. Sophia spends most of her time alone; it’s isolating, it’s frightening. Resonance truly is a masterpiece in atmospheric horror.

Where Resonance really shines, however, is in its narrative. Asobo has proven that it can consistently ruin your day, even when you think you’re safe. From the onset, you realize that no one is safe in this game; not your friends, not your family, and certainly not your foes. Death, like the plague itself, is all-consuming. This isn’t a happy story; there’s no victory, no triumph. There is only crushing silence.

While I’m not going to spoil anything here, Resonance is effectively a gut-punch simulator, with twist after twist. It makes you question who the ‘bad guys’ are; is it the monster? Is it the soldiers? Is it an ancient king blinded by greed, or a traitor worried about the fate of their friends? There’s no black and white here; in the darkness there is light, and in the light there is shadow. Narratively, Asobo continues to excel, with Resonance still feeling like a Plague Tale game, despite the heavier focus on combat and new characters.

You’ll see strands of Innocence and Requiem woven in here, too. Sometimes Sophia isn’t alone, and even some of her dialog and interactions feel similar to Amicia’s. The Macula, as expected, is very much present, but in a different way to what we’ve seen before. There are themes of love, loss, and self-sacrifice: Resonance has Plague Tale DNA, yet stands strong as its own experience. It’s impressive, and exactly what I was hoping for.

I did, however, encounter a significant array of bugs and performance drops. During early cutscenes, a t-posing version of little Sophia went flying across my screen before loading in fully, and during a dream sequence she spawned both on top of the bed and then beneath it. Moving between areas often caused significant lags, especially as textures popped in and out. My PC can easily run the game, and ironically, areas with lots of floating particles didn’t seem to be an issue. If anything, that’s where the gameplay was the smoothest.

There were a couple of game-breaking issues, too. During one fight sequence, I got stuck inside a wall, and despite enemies trying to attack me, they couldn’t. I had to reload the save then try again. I also encountered an odd issue that prevented me from jumping in a tunnel, but after squeezing myself out of the crack I’d come in from, then back again, it seemed to fix itself.

I also struggled with the game’s keybinds. On mouse and keyboard, I found the choice of ‘alt f’ for Sophia’s special attack to be a little unwieldy in combat, and ‘caps lock’ for the sphere to be a little clunky when fighting some of the light-based enemies further into the game. When I tried to bind these to my side mouse buttons, it simply didn’t work. This may be because I was playing a review build of the game, and that rebind functionality simply wasn’t working. My mouse, however, isn’t particularly exotic (Razer Viper V3 Pro), so it seemed a little odd that the changes just didn’t go through.

I was worried that Resonance would ‘mainstreamify’ Plague Tale. I’ve seen countless, action-oriented versions of my favorite videogames come and go, and I haven’t really found one that I’ve actually liked. Resonance, however, blends the core Plague Tale spirit with stylish action gameplay to create something that is fun, yet authentic to the source material. Is it anything we haven’t seen before? No – it’s an action game with parkour elements and puzzles. Is it still worth playing? Absolutely.