{"id":11633,"date":"2026-09-09T15:25:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T05:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=11633"},"modified":"2026-11-06T16:28:59","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T06:28:59","slug":"resonance-a-plague-tale-legacy-the-islands-dark-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/09\/09\/resonance-a-plague-tale-legacy-the-islands-dark-price\/","title":{"rendered":"Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy: The Island’s Dark Price."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With Tomb Raider and Uncharted both taking extremely long breaks there’s been a decidedly large hole that I don’t think anyone has meaningfully tried to fill. I mean sure, you could argue that Indiana Jones and The Great Circle<\/a> or Jedi Survivor<\/a> have kind of held the torch but both of them have something missing. I’d argue that they’re more different than similar to what those headliner games were and it feels like the industry has collectively just decided to leave that space vacant until one of them comes back (which is of course going to be Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis). So imagine my surprise when Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy<\/a> turns out to be pretty much what I would expect from a Tomb Raider game, albeit with a slightly more focused set of mechanics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Set 15 years prior to the events of A Plague Tale; Requiem<\/a> you are put in control of Sophia, the smuggler known as the Sea Scorpion. She was left in the care of a covenant and, unbeknownst to her father, was subjected to experiments with the macula that caused her to have visions of an ancient civilization that had long since faded away. Shortly after being rescued you learn of your father’s travels to an island, one where the visions and drawings you had helped guide them towards a treasure of unimaginable value. This is also when you began your training as a fighter, smuggler and general larrikin who’s loved by all the crew. That pursuit of treasure unfortunately, like it always does, set the crew on a course for destruction and loss that they could not imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The in-house developed Zouna engine powers Resonance and once again it’s pretty incredible to see this level of visuals from an AA level game developer. The game is most certainly at its best in the wide open spaces with the incredible vistas that you’re treated to just begging you to crack open photo mode to get some good shots. That being said even the in-close and enclosed areas are still treated well, indeed many of the in-game cutscenes feeling exceptionally close to pre-rendered ones, but the game just feels all the more impressive when you’re overlooking a massive cliff watching a full navy fleet roll in. I would say that I was surprised that performance was good but given I’m now rocking the coveted RTX5090 as my graphics card that feels a bit disingenuous. It’d be more of a shock if it didn’t<\/em> run well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Where previous Plague titles started you out in stealth-only and slowly morphed into an all out murder spree simulator Resonance sets itself up quickly as an exploration game with beat ’em up combat elements much like the Arkham <\/a>series although much smaller in scale. The Tomb Raider vibes I got came from the core game loop’s beats of putting you in an area to explore (often scattered with lore items around it), blocking progression with a puzzle and then usually throwing in a fight or two along the way. To be sure it’s a much more focused experience than many of the similar games that come to mind but that’s part of it’s charm: there really isn’t much unecessary stuff thrown in here to cloud the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beat ’em up combat style works well enough although does start to get somewhat repetitive as the encounters drag on. You see unlike a lot of similar games where you’ll unlock new abilities to counter certain enemy types Resonance puts all of its abilities into talent trees of your choosing. That means the game can never rely on you having a particular talent so all enemies are defeatable with the basic toolkit. That makes most of the upgrades then fall into what will increase your quality of life the most like for me making the red attacks parrayable so I didn’t have to think too much in the heat of the moment. You won’t, much to my disappointment, become the nigh unstoppable killing machine that Amicia always became but you can get dangerously close to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One big difference in Resonance though is the boss fights which are a lot more involved than previous ones. Before they were mostly action oriented puzzles, testing your ability to solve them under pressure more than they were true combat encounters. In Resonance you’ll be put up against NPCs in a very dark-souls-esque style encounter which will require you to learn movesets, dodge timings and all that good stuff in order to get through them. Indeed I think I only one shot one or two bosses out of the whole lot, with one of them giving me trouble for a good 30 mins. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Progression comes steadily and in multiple forms, all of which are driven by your desire to explore the map to find materials and items that will push you forward. The main progression mechanic is the resonance points, effectively the talent points that will let you unlock and upgrade new abilities. These are usually scattered around in the most obvious places since the devs do want you to get more powerful over time, just not to the same level as in previous games. If you hunted them all down I’m very sure you could easily max out the talent tree well before the last few fights come through but if I’m honest once I had my core upgrades done the rest just felt like window dressing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The other progression system is the charms, bracelets and other charms you can pick up which give you stacking bonuses for certain things. Each of the type of charms will increase one kind of thing like the chance for an arrow to miss you or increasing the parry window and finding additional ones in each level increases the effect. Given it’s slowly slowly nature of increasing the effect it’s hard to tell if it’s having much of an effect or not but I will say that there were some times when I felt like I got away with being really sloppy<\/em> and the only reason I could tease out was that I was saved by the charms and simply didn’t pick up on it at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m a little on the fence with Resonance’s story I think mostly because it’s been 4 years since the previous one and I really had zero context as to where Sophia fit into the whole picture. I certainly didn’t remember any conversations between her and Amicia about the macula so to see her deep journey with it landed weirdly in my head for a good long while. That being said it does stand on its own quite well, enough that for those who’d missed the original 2 games (and didn’t want to play them) I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend playing this one first to see if the world intrigued you. To be sure, there’s a good chunk of spoilers for the world in here, but if a stealth only narrative driven game didn’t get you then maybe a Tomb-Raider-esque adventure might better fit the bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sitting down to write this I was honestly feeling like I was going to end up being more negative about Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. I can remember struggling through hour after hour with it and feeling like it wasn’t really sticking with me. The fact that I went back through my previous Plague reviews, looked through my screenshots and then wrote everything you just read though says a lot about the game and the franchise. Maybe sometimes I just need a little space between my playing of the game and my review of it. Something to consider for the future I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating: 8.75\/10<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X\/S right now for $68.95. Total playtime was 10 hours with 61% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Tomb Raider and Uncharted both taking extremely long breaks there’s been a decidedly large hole that I don’t think anyone has meaningfully tried to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":11638,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,16],"tags":[1140,2032,6022,6561,733,6402,3679,6449,2410,6401],"class_list":["post-11633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","category-review","tag-action","tag-adventure","tag-asobo-studio","tag-focus-entertainment","tag-pc","tag-playstation-5","tag-puzzler","tag-singleplayer","tag-third-person","tag-xbox-series-x"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-31D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Resonance-A-Plauge-Tale-Legacy-Review-Screenshot-Wallpaper-Title-Screen-scaled.png?fit=2560%2C1067&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11639,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633\/revisions\/11639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}