A Plague Tale returns for a more action-focused spin-off story, does it resonate?
What Is It? Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a 2026 action-adventure release from Asobo Studio. The game takes place fifteen years before the first Plague Tale game and follows the early life of Sophia, a ship captain who aids Amicia and Hugo in Requiem.
From the start, this game carries similar vibes as the two prior games in the series. The visuals look great but aren’t as pixel-perfect as the biggest AAA budget games out there, this is truly a AA experience but I have zero complaints about that. The game is set in the fourteenth century and the early towns and castle-cities you explore reflect that quite well.
The game starts showing Sophia as a small child undergoing blood infusion tests at a convent. Her father rescues her, but not before she is cursed with nightmares of a deadly island. From here, various videogame-esque story points occur, including death, betrayal, love, and revenge, then Sophia’s adventure truly begins.
The biggest change in this mostly linear third person game, with only small open-ish areas breaking up the fully linear paths, is that Resonance leans heavier into the action side of action-adventure than the first two in the series. You will spend a lot of time in this game killing bad guys with Sophia’s sword and knife combo. The game features a fairly limited move set with the standard dodge/block/parry accompanying the normal and charged attacks and a block-breaking kick move. A small skill tree, unlockable through “resonance points” found throughout the game, unlocks some variations on the base combat such as being able to store a throwable instead of immediately throwing it, or being able to parry a previously un-parryable red attack.
Combat in this game is entirely melee focused outside of those rare throwables you can find during a fight. It is heavy, impactful, and fun, but it does not offer much variety. There is a major enemy variety change in the final quarter of the game which spices things up, but mostly you’re just fighting the same three or four soldier types over and over. A few boss fights break this up as well, these are fun and tough. Sophia only has three hit points. You regain one when you kill an enemy, so the fights against normal enemies typically aren’t too difficult, but the boss fights only offer health regeneration between phases which can be pretty tough. The fights play out as Sophia blocking and dodging when necessary, parrying when possible, and striking when the enemy is exposed. It is a fairly simple system, but it works and manages not to overstay its welcome in this eleven-ish hour adventure.
Beyond combat, the other main component of the gameplay is the puzzle solving. This feels right out of an Uncharted or Tomb Raider game, with a heavy dose of Plague Tale DNA mixed in.The puzzles are fun and varied to a degree. Many of them involve directing light towards the right place, but the mechanisms for figuring out what the right place is does change with each puzzle. I could take or leave puzzles in most games, unless they are specifically puzzle games, and I feel the same way about the puzzles here. They never get too difficult or tedious, so I didn’t mind them as a way to break up the combat sequences, but I was never excited to see another puzzle.
I hit the credits in about eleven hours which felt pretty perfect for this game. Its systems are all strong, but aside from a few later in the game that I won’t spoil here, none were great either. The story was interesting enough to keep me invested, even if I had totally forgotten who Sophia was before playing this. The game features a handful of memorable characters and a good mix of intrigue and uncertainty along the way.
The Best Part: Without going into any spoiler-ish level of details, I will say that I really enjoyed how much the gameplay varied throughout Sophia’s adventure. Ten hours of beating up the same soldiers would not have landed very well with me, nor would just the puzzles. The game always has something else up its sleeve, be it small platforming sections or really cool stuff I won’t mention for spoiler reasons. Pace is so important in videogames and Resonance is a great example of how a well paced game can overcome having fairly standard gameplay mechanics simply by switching things up as you go. It turns out that doing five different, pretty good things over the course of a game can be way better than doing one really good thing the entire time.
The Worst Part: This game, truly, doesn’t do anything particularly special. Not one single aspect of it is strong enough to make me say “wow, I wish other games copied this gameplay mechanic!” There are a lot of good aspects here, and it all comes together wonderfully, but I feel this game doesn’t quite go as far in forging its own identity as the first two Plague Tale games did.
The Verdict: The Plague Tale games have both been fun games that I’ve had a great time with, then mostly forgotten about afterwards. Resonance feels like it will carry on in the same tradition.
I enjoyed the more action-heavy focus it takes, but also found myself missing the stealth-focused, underdog story of the original. In Resonance, Sophia is a certified badass. She will run into a group of fully armed soldiers and take them all out in a minute. She’s quick, powerful, and capable as a fighter and the game absolutely leans into that aspect. This isn’t a bad thing, and is actually quite a good thing when she rarely shows her vulnerable sides, but it is a big departure from the prior games and that takes some getting used to.
Between “The Worst Part” and this summary so far, you’d think I had a bad time with Resonance, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I had a wonderful time playing this game! At this point in the year, it pretty safely sits in my top 5-7 games of 2026, which is a nice accomplishment given how stacked the year has been so far. It is tough for me to not wonder what the game could have been if they captured more of the originals’ DNA or added another layer to the combat. Despite all of that, this is a very fun action-adventure game which tells an interesting story, looks great along the way, and always manages to keep you guessing as to what will come next, gameplay or story-wise.
How to Play: Xbox Series*, PlayStation 5, PC
*console played on for this review
Leave a Reply