The team behind the acclaimed A Plague Tale series has ventured beyond medieval France and the rat-infested horrors that defined its previous entries. Asobo Studio’s latest offering, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, transplants the franchise to sun-drenched Crete, weaving together Bronze Age legend with familiar action-adventure mechanics. The game, released today on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC, follows Sophia—a supporting character from A Plague Tale: Requiem—as she navigates both ancient ruins and a deeply personal journey toward self-determination.
The premise crackles with potential. Two timelines intersect: a Minoan warrior from millennia past and Sophia herself, connected through some unexplained visionary bond. Actions echo across centuries—a bronze mechanism set in motion in 1500 BCE somehow still functions in the medieval present. It’s a clever meta-concept that could have anchored something truly memorable.
Instead, players spend the majority of their time doing what countless action-adventure games have trained us to do: push forwards. Left thumb firmly planted on the analogue stick. Dash, vault, swing, crouch behind conveniently placed cover. The template here draws heavily from Tomb Raider’s lineage, later refined by Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. From an interactive standpoint, little genuinely surprises.
A Heroine Worth rooting For
Happily, Sophia herself provides the spark that keeps Resonance aloft. She’s spiky, confident, and comes from an intriguing background—the daughter of a wealthy mother and a smuggler father, scarred by childhood abuse at a nunnery before escaping to become a capable, cut-throat fighter in her twenties. Watching her grow from that frightened child into someone hunting the legendary treasure of Crete’s Minotaur-infested caves delivers genuine emotional investment.
The game opens with Sophia as a young girl. A time skip then catapults us roughly a decade forward. This narrative choice pays dividends, allowing players to feel the weight of her survival rather than simply being told about it.
Asobo deserves credit for resisting the dour, greyscale approach that dominated Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey adaptation. Their Crete feels almost aggressively picturesque at first—soft sandstone cliffs, swallows performing aerial dances in the evening light, vivid vegetation strangling ancient statues. The Minoan frescoes prove particularly stunning, their deep oranges and yellows blazing with colours that have somehow survived millennia.
When the game switches perspective to the Bronze Age warrior, the results are uniformly delightful. Crowds baying for blood, stands draped in textile finery, magenta flowers scattered across mosaic floors—these moments offer genuine visual feast.
Light, Puzzles, and Melee Combat
The darkness arrives gradually. Beneath Crete’s postcard exterior lurks something terrible, and the game gradually reveals its mythology’s uglier underbelly. Asobo’s signature fascination with light persists—after all, light manipulation proved crucial in the original A Plague Tale games for warding off rat hordes. Here, Sophia carries a sphere capable of reflecting and refracting beams, central to environmental puzzles that require rotating supersized lenses.
Unfortunately, these puzzles never quite achieve the “aha” satisfaction that the best adventure games deliver. Solutions are typically singular and clearly signposted. You follow the designer’s logic, pause briefly, then push onwards. Rarely does genuine creative problem-solving emerge.
Combat proves more memorable, particularly during the game’s climax. Swirling light causes calcified, zombie-like figures to disintegrate into dust as Sophia tees up their demise with lethal sword strikes. These encounters—balletic, show-stopping sequences where light and movement interweave—represent some of the most dynamic melee combat in the roughly twelve-hour run time.
Why it Matters
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy lands at an interesting moment for the action-adventure genre. While the game follows familiar templates without much deviation, its presentation and character work elevate it above mere retread. For the games industry, this release demonstrates the continued commercial viability of mythology-driven narratives and the potential for established franchises to reinvent themselves geographically while maintaining core identity. Sophia’s journey—from abuse survivor to self-determined heroine confronting ancient destiny—offers something beyond typical treasure-hunting fare, suggesting audiences hunger for characters with genuine emotional depth. Whether Asobo’s gamble on Greek mythology pays dividends commercially remains to be seen, but creatively, they’ve delivered a swashbuckling adventure that honours its source material while carving its own path through ancient ruins.