In 2022, Asobo Studio had a breakthrough moment with A Plague Tale: Requiem. The stealth game impressed critics enough to earn a Game of the Year nomination at the 2022 Game Awards, thanks to its emotional storytelling and gorgeous visuals. It was an impressive feat for an AA studio, but one that would be hard to pull off twice. Reviews for the studio’s new game, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, just dropped, and critics are a bit more lukewarm on the prequel.
At the time of writing, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is sitting at a 79 on Metacritic. (It’s faring better on OpenCritic, with an 85 score, but the aggregate platform has yet to ingest some of the harshest reviews.) That puts it behind both A Plague Tale: Requiem (82) and Innocence (81). It’s fairly on par as an aggregate score, but the actual reviews powering that number are inconsistent.
That’s understandable given that Resonance is a big departure for the series, trading in rats and stealth for a treasure-hunting action game. Some outlets are all for that change, In an 8.5/10 review, Game Informer’s Kyle Hilliard sung the prequel’s praises. While Hilliard says that Resonance was his introduction to the series, he quickly found out why so many people have fallen in love with it. Specifically, he loved the game’s characters, including its hero, Sophia.
“She is strong, smart, and like many of the pirates in her community, I questioned why she wasn’t already in charge,” Hilliard wrote. “Sophia’s relationships are established well and quickly, and it makes the stakes of her dangerous adventure appropriately threatening. The performances in the game are also excellent, effective in both the dramatic moments and the quiet conversational ones.”
Though plenty of publications had similar praise, the biggest outlets weren’t nearly as impressed. IGN’s Travis Northup awarded the game a middling 6/10. Northup gave Asobo Studio credit for trying to mix things up rather than make the same game a third time, but wasn’t won over by the pivot away from careful stealth.
“The shift from stealth to all-out combat isn’t the most seamless transition – not exactly bad, but consistently shallow and sometimes sloppy, with standard light and heavy attacks, a kick to break your opponent’s guard, and just a handful of bad guys with two or three different attacks to learn,” Northup wrote. “So much of the time between its entertaining puzzles is spent in these claustrophobic arenas, but there’s so little depth to combat that it almost immediately felt too one-note to sustain my interest.”
Eurogamer’s Chris Schilling walked away with similarly mixed feelings, but for different reasons. Schilling was satisfied enough with the game’s customizable action and Tomb Raider-like exploration, but less enthused by the overly grim storytelling.
“Even as it tries to mix things up, though, Asobo makes the same mistake as it did in Requiem and ladles on the trauma in great heaping portions,” Schilling wrote in a three-star review. “There are sights here that Hieronymous Bosch might well declare a ‘a bit much’. Granted, you don’t go into a game with ‘plague’ in the title expecting super happy fun times. But what felt impressively pitiless (and occasionally blackly comic) in Innocence becomes a full-on descent into abject misery.”
Those so-so perspectives match our own experience with the game. gamexplore’s Willa Rowe similarly landed in the middle of the road, nonplussed by the “deeply boring” action but impressed by the world design and strong performances by the cast. If you’ve come to enjoy the Plague Tale series for its cinematic qualities, Resonance will still likely click with you. Just be prepared for a whole different kind of game that barely feels connected to the series.
