The latest A Plague Tale game is a prequel with very little connection to the previous titles, and yet its more action-oriented approach may make it the best entry in series so far.
New releases in the majority of video game franchises are immediately recognisable. Outings of EA Sports FC, Call Of Duty, and Super Mario Bros. each have distinctive qualities and fresh additions, but there are so many familiar elements that you would never mistake them for anything else. Other series are more circumspect. Final Fantasy, for example, with its love of novel settings and reinventions of its combat system, rarely looks or feels similar to past instalments.
These looser franchises tend to share themes and styles of interaction rather than simply being augmented versions of the same game. The first two Plague Tale titles were about a girl leading her younger brother through disease ridden Middle Ages Europe, escaping hideous rat tsunamis via stealth, and running in blind panic. This new game is set 15 years before the original A Plague Tale: Innocence, and the only character they have in common appears as a cameo in the new game’s epilogue, making this an almost entirely separate experience.
What the games share is purely stylistic. All are third person action role-playing games that explore themes of threat and vulnerability, via stealth interspersed with breathless chase sequences. Legacy, though, is considerably more combat orientated, since its heroine, Sophia, is a grown woman rather than a scared child – and one who’s been brought up to handle weapons at least as ably as her male peers.
As is the current vogue, parrying is a central component in fights, with blocks undertaken at the last moment temporarily stunning antagonists. Sophia can also kick to break guards or knock back enemies with shields. She can also use her grapple hook to drag lighter foes towards her, briefly knocking them to the floor for a good pasting.
It’s a toolkit of moves that’s introduced over a number of hours, letting you get used to the rhythms of each before adding further complexity. You’ll earn resonance points from completing bigger battles, as well as finding them around the game’s environments, and those can be used to buy and upgrade new skills. These include the ability to pick up throwables to use later, a double kick, an extra dodge, and more, with each carrying a second optional level of mastery.
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Battles get steadily more interesting as encounters involve larger numbers of aggressors, balanced by your ever expanding set of special moves, and your own skill as a player. Increasingly taxing encounters demand more than just button mashing, their added intensity teaching you to be intentional with each strike and block, as well as tactically leaving cannon fodder alive as you whittle down larger enemies, their eventual deaths useful because they top up a portion of your health bar.
Resonance retains the classic Plague Tale chase sequences, but rather than a horror movie style flood of man-eating rats, this time you’re running away from ‘the creature’. In many of Resonance’s underground areas, unless you’re creeping around you leave glowing blue footprints wherever you walk or run. That’s useful when you’re trying to keep track of a sidekick as you explore, but it’s also one of the ways the creature sniffs you out.
Moving like an animated column of smoke, it extends its long body before briefly exhaling, giving you a second or two to find cover, then inhaling deeply, immediately launching itself at any sparkly blue iridescence in its line of sight. As well as your footsteps, if Sophia is in the open, the same sparkly powder flows from her, leading the creature to lunge and devour her instantly.
Fortunately, as with a surprising number of video game monsters, it’s terrified of bright illumination, so pools of lantern light become safe zones, often coinciding with checkpoints, and always supplying a moment of blessed relief from the constant pressure. You’ll find other lanterns whose covers have been broken. They also provide protection, but are extinguished by the creature’s inhalation phase, their safety only fleeting.
It’s a set of systems applied with great aplomb by developer Asobo Studio, with initial set-ups letting you learn the ropes and subsequent encounters ratcheting up the complexity. You’ll also find those structured stealth areas sometimes give way to all out chases, where the creature has your scent, forcing you to leap gaps, squeeze through cracks, and swing across chasms while it snaps at your heals. Although you realise intellectually that those scenes are designed to make you sweat, they remain ruthlessly efficient at that job.
The other thing that propels you through Resonance’s fights, stealth sections, and puzzles is its story, which centres around a retelling of the myth of King Minos and the Minotaur, albeit with several of its own tweaks to that tale. Sophia has had persistent supernatural visions since early childhood and all of them have been leading her, and those near her, to the island where that legend was born.
Many come in search of treasure, whereas she just wants answers, her frequent visions letting her relive the adventures of Theseus and Ariadne, whose exploits echo around the ruins she finds in her own time period.
The quality of the voice acting, especially Sophia’s, is exceptional. Her cries of grief, pain, and rage are distressingly authentic, viscerally conveying her character’s feelings and making her journey extremely emotionally involving. Paired with the excellent underlying mechanical systems, it makes the whole experience even more satisfying.
