Video game openings are tough. Not only do they have to establish a setting and story stakes, they also have to teach you how to play the damn thing. The new James Bond, 007 First Light, excels in throwing you into a kick-ass stealth section in Iceland before pivoting to a lightning-fast tutorial montage in Malta. It’s an excellent way to open a game.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, the latest in Asobo Studio’s Rat Game series, has quite the opposite opening. It drags and drags, and after the first couple hours, I started wondering if I should drop the game entirely. Thankfully I didn’t, because eventually I hit sections where I got to kick dudes to death, and combat flipped from “fine” to “fun.” The game really opened up in all areas, and showed that, sometimes, sticking with something past initial disappointment pays off.
The game starts when protagonist Sophia is a child, and it takes forever to teach you its controls, which are rather basic. Sophia is thrown into a fighting pit three separate times so you can learn Resonance’s combat, which never evolves much past this opening sequence. You use one button to parry, and another to attack. Off you go.
Sophia does have a kick ability that’s used to break opponents’ guard. It adds some variety to combat, and is a great tool for quickly disposing of weak foes, especially after I upgraded it to have Sophia perform a follow-up kick too. During an early-game combat encounter, after the game finally got into the swing of things, I kicked a dude off a ledge to his death. “Oh, now we’re cooking,” I thought. Now this shit was getting fun.
It got even better during a flashback section. Sophia receives various visions throughout the game, and they often take her back in time, where you play as the Greek hero Theseus. During the best vision sequence, Theseus has to kill a gaggle of guys on platforms suspended in water. Because water is so often instant death in video games, instead of engaging my enemies with sword strikes or parries, I just went around kicking them in the water. Have a nice swim! It was wonderful, and the moment when I really started to gel with the game. Suddenly, I wasn’t going through the motions in combat; I was looking for any opportunity to kick enemies to death.
All of this coalesced in a scene later in the game. Sophia ends up on a bridge with wave after wave of enemy soldiers in her way. And, you see, this bridge has no safeguards, no railings; there’s nothing protecting unsuspecting folks from falling off the edge. So what’s a guy to do but start kicking dudes off the bridge?
Immediately when I hit that bridge, I abandoned all ideas of “parrying” and “attacking.” Kick, I must. I ran from soldier to soldier, kicking them to their doom, gravity my most loyal combat companion. I shifted my positioning on the battlefield, not to expose an opening in a foe, but to angle those foes in a prime spot to get kicked into oblivion.
My strategy wasn’t the best, admittedly. I took more hits than I’d want since I focused less on defense and more on trying to kill as many dudes with my boot as possible. (Resonance lacks a camera lock-on function, which didn’t help navigating the horde of enemies either.) For a brief few minutes, I was in video game bliss. It was like kicking English officers overboard in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, cranked up to eleven.
That sequence also showed why trudging through snoozefest openings can pay off in the end. The back half of Resonance has really clicked for me, outside of just that kick-filled sequence on the bridge. I’ve enjoyed the interludes where Sophia’s visions take her to the past; they raise questions I’m excited to see answered. There’s also a ton of stealth sections in the latter half of Resonance through creepy environments that allow Asobo to flex its strengths after the first two A Plague Tale games were more stealth-focused.
Because of Xbox Game Pass and other gaming subscription services, publishers now discuss their games’ popularity in terms of “players” and not “copies sold.” As Resonance is a day-one title on Game Pass, I expect it to reach a ton of players. I just have to wonder how many of those players will dip out relatively quickly, as Resonance puts its worst foot forward at the jump.
Sometimes you just know when to drop something. I played a couple matches of The Duskbloods during the recent network test, quickly realized this game was not for me (despite being a big Soulslike guy), and noped out of there more quickly than Sonic going fast. And other times, pushing through a game pays off with the ability to send dozens of dudes falling to their death with my boot.
