Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Review

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is Asobo Studio's prequel to its acclaimed Innocence and Requiem duology, set fifteen years before Requiem and following Sophia, a character audiences met only briefly in that earlier game. With 1,339 reviews sitting at 92% positive, it's clear the studio's willingness to take a real formula risk, trading rat-swarm stealth for aggressive melee combat, has largely paid off, even as the review sample makes clear exactly where that risk didn't fully land.

A deliberate break from the series' stealth identity

Where Innocence and Requiem built their identity around Amicia's slingshot, hiding from patrols, and the ever-present threat of the rat swarm, Resonance restructures its gameplay almost entirely around Sophia's aggressive combat style: swordplay, parries, dodges, and finishing moves that multiple reviewers compare directly to Uncharted or the Arkham series. Several point out this wasn't really optional, since the story is set before Hugo's condition and the rats that defined the earlier games' central threat, so Asobo needed a genuinely different hook rather than forcing a diluted version of the old one. As a creative decision, it's consistently credited as bold and, for the most part, well executed, even by reviewers who ultimately prefer the older formula.

Music and visuals carry real emotional weight

The most consistently, specifically praised element across the entire review sample is Olivier Deriviere's score, with multiple reviewers independently ranking it among the best game music they've heard recently, in some cases explicitly placing it alongside composers like Mick Gordon and Jesper Kyd. Visually, Minotaur Island's ruins, labyrinths, and lighting are repeatedly singled out as some of the strongest environmental art in the series, and the Theseus dream sequences in particular draw specific, enthusiastic praise as visually distinct standout sections. Technical performance is also unusually clean for a 2026 release, with numerous reviewers, including several playing on Steam Deck OLED and ROG Ally handhelds, reporting no crashes, stutters, or meaningful frame drops.

Underdeveloped characters blunt the emotional beats

Where the series previously excelled, building deep, two-game emotional arcs for Amicia and Hugo, Resonance struggles within a single, shorter game. Leni, Sophia's close companion, and Faro, a morally ambiguous father figure turned antagonist turned ally, are both repeatedly described as introduced too quickly and developed too thinly for their eventual deaths to land with real weight. One detailed reviewer describes feeling almost nothing at Leni's death despite the game clearly intending it as a gut-punch moment, directly attributing this to insufficient setup time compared to how the earlier games built relationships across their full runtimes. This isn't a universal complaint, several reviewers do connect with Sophia's journey and find the Greek mythology framing genuinely fresh, but it's consistent enough across the sample to treat as a real structural weakness rather than a one-off gripe.

Combat that some find undercooked

A second recurring criticism concerns combat depth specifically. While the new system is functional and reasonably enjoyable in the moment, several reviewers describe most enemy encounters as insufficiently threatening, reducible to repeated button-mashing regardless of an enemy's apparent armour or size, with bosses singled out as a particular weak point. This sits in tension with the praise for Sophia's moveset itself; reviewers generally like how combat feels to execute, they just wish the game gave them more meaningfully difficult encounters to use it against.

Puzzle fatigue by the finale

The exploration and puzzle-solving side of Resonance draws warmer reception early on, several reviewers specifically enjoy the light, mirror, and route-memorization puzzles introduced across the game's first half, but a clear pattern emerges of that goodwill eroding by the final act. Multiple reviewers independently describe growing exhausted with an over-reliance on the same sphere-and-light mechanic stretched across too many late-game sequences, a structural pacing issue that several tie directly to the game's decision to lower its difficulty near the end just to reach the story's conclusion. Collectibles draw a similar complaint: the sheer number of missable resonance fragments and past/present collectibles is described by more than one reviewer as actively distracting from the story rather than rewarding exploration.

A shorter game at a comparable price

Value is the most consistently divisive theme in the sample. Completion times cluster around ten to twenty hours depending on difficulty and collectible-hunting, noticeably shorter than either Innocence or Requiem, while the asking price sits at or above what those earlier, longer games cost. Several reviewers explicitly flag this mismatch as the reason they'd recommend waiting for a sale rather than buying at launch price, even among reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the game significantly. Others push back, arguing the tighter runtime suits the more linear, story-focused structure Asobo was going for, and that judging it purely on hours-per-dollar misses what the game is actually trying to do.

Final Verdict

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a genuinely ambitious prequel that earns real credit for not simply repeating what came before, its music and Theseus sequences alone justify checking it out for series fans. Where it falls short is in the character work and pacing that made Innocence and Requiem so memorable in the first place: Leni and Faro needed more room to breathe, and the back half leans on puzzle mechanics past the point of diminishing returns. It's a good, sometimes great, action-adventure with a shorter, pricier package than its predecessors, best appreciated by fans willing to meet Asobo's new direction on its own terms rather than expecting more of the same.