Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Trades the Rats for a Blade, and Mostly Gets Away With It

The headline change is combat, and it is a real one. Where earlier Plague Tale protagonists threw rocks and lit torches to survive, Sophia carries a blade and knows how to use it. Asobo has openly cited Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro, and Sifu as touchstones, and you feel all three in the parrying, the timing windows, and the brutal finishing moves. The cleverest wrinkle is a health system that rewards aggression: defeating enemies restores health you have lost, so retreating and turtling is punished and pressing the fight is the way back to safety. It gives even routine skirmishes a push-forward rhythm that suits a character defined by nerve rather than fear.

Traversal has opened up to match. Sophia moves with a freedom the series has never allowed before, climbing and leaping across the island's ruins and reaching high ground with a grappling hook, so the levels can go vertical in a way the claustrophobic corridors of Innocence and Requiem never did. It is a small mechanical addition with a large effect on the feel of the game, turning exploration from a nervous crawl into something closer to an expedition. The island wants to be climbed, and the game gives you the tools to do it.

Puzzles remain a core pillar, and here the series' fascination with light gets a new instrument. Sophia carries a stolen Minoan sphere that manipulates light, and much of the island's problem-solving is built around bending, redirecting, and channelling it through ancient mechanisms. It is a satisfying central gimmick, tied neatly to both the setting's mythology and the series' long love of light as a tool and a threat, and the best of these sequences have the unhurried, tactile pleasure of a good Tomb Raider tomb.

Structurally, the game leans on a dual timeline. Sophia's medieval present is threaded through with the ancient Minoan past, and events centuries old echo forward to shape what she faces now. It is an ambitious framing that gives the writing room to build its mystery in layers, and it is where Resonance feels most confident in its own identity rather than borrowed from its influences. When the two timelines rhyme, the story lands with real weight.

Stealth, the old spine of the series, has been deliberately dialled back. It is present, but it is quieter and largely backloaded to the final third, where a relentless stalking creature reintroduces the old dread and forces you to hide and evade rather than fight. The rats, too, are here, but as texture rather than the central survival mechanic, which is exactly the trade the whole game is built around. Fans hoping for another rat-swarm survival puzzle box should know that is not what this is, and Push Square's review said it plainly by calling it a solid story game without the rats.

The honest weaknesses of the loop are the familiar ones for this kind of prestige adventure. The opening is slow, taking its time to hand you the tools that make it sing, and the combat that feels fresh in the first hours can start to repeat itself across a long campaign, since the enemy variety and encounter design do not always keep pace with how good it feels to fight. It is a well-built system that could have used a little more to do with itself.

Presentation is where Resonance spends its blockbuster ambitions, and for the most part they pay off. The move from the muted greys of plague-era France to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island is a smart one, giving Asobo warm stone, deep shadow, and shafts of hard light to build around, and the studio's long expertise with lighting and atmosphere carries directly into the new palette. The Minotaur's Island is a genuinely evocative place, and the light-based puzzles double as a showcase for the thing the engine does best.

The character work is the other half of the craft, and it is the stronger half. Sophia is a vivid lead, and the voice performances and writing around her are consistently praised as the game's high point, carrying an emotional, often tragic story past its more derivative stretches. This is a studio that has always understood that its set pieces matter less than the people caught inside them, and Resonance keeps that priority intact even as it borrows a genre it did not previously play in.

The caveat is technical, and it is worth stating plainly. Performance is the recurring blemish across coverage, with frame-rate problems called out sharply in some reviews, and it is the clearest sign of a mid-budget team reaching for a triple-A silhouette without quite the resources to lock everything down. It does not sink the experience, but it is the seam that shows, and how much it bothers you will depend on your platform and your tolerance for the occasional stutter in a game this cinematic.