Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy ditches stealth for melee combat Asobo built from scratch

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a spinoff that changes almost everything about the Plague Tale formula: no stealth, no Amicia and Hugo, no France. Instead, you play Sophia — the pirate mentor from Requiem — 16 years before the events of that game, in 1333, as she explores an ancient temple on the Greek island of Crete. It's also the first combat game Asobo Studio has ever made, and early previews suggest they pulled it off.

The game runs two timelines in parallel. Sophia probes the ruins in the present, but at key moments the game yanks you back thousands of years into the body of Theseus himself, dropping you into a gladiatorial battle on a doughnut-shaped platform packed with combatants — drums pounding, an announcer bellowing, cultish atmosphere everywhere. Sophia's combat draws inspiration from Ghost of Tsushima, Batman Arkham, and Marvel's Spider-Man, but she fights dirty: kicking enemies off ledges, smashing bottles over heads, yanking foes off balance with a grappling hook, and using the environment — crates, walls, pillars — to stagger and finish them. There's a skill tree, multiple swords with different combo finishers, and Theseus has his own separate, upgradeable moveset. Lead level designer Valérian Robert was candid about the learning curve: "Nobody did a combat game before Resonance," he said, adding that the team drew on Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro, and Sifu to find their formula. Early builds were too brutal — Robert says the difficulty "didn't blend well with what the game was about" — so Asobo had to tune it for players coming from a stealth series who aren't Soulslike veterans. The result: three solid hits can still kill Sophia, but dirty tricks like the bottle stun give less precise players a genuine way to even the odds.

Puzzles built around light remain a series staple, though here you're not herding rats — you're using a sphere on Sophia's belt as a kind of UV torch to reveal hidden symbols and unlock stone doors deeper into an improbably vast temple. Eurogamer notes the architecture shifts from Gaudi-esque organic walls to enormous mosaic-covered chambers, and the visual detail on characters and environments is described as exquisite. Producer Eric Chort hinted that stealth might not be entirely absent — "there are some mysteries, there will be something" — but gave nothing concrete away.

Resonance still carries the emotional storytelling DNA of the series, with The Last of Us cited as a consistent reference point for narrative tone. The rat swarms are gone, and the series has moved a long way from its origins, but both previews land in the same place: this is unmistakably a Plague Tale game, and a promising one.