The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example.
Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards. This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion.
You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us.
Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies. Yet the Bordeaux-based studio Asobo conjures magic from the familiar. Sophia, a supporting character from the second game in the A Plague Tale series, carries this swashbuckling adventure with aplomb.
She is spiky and confident, the daughter of a wealthy mother and a smuggler father. The game starts with her as a young child, recently escaped from abuse in a nunnery, before cutting to roughly a decade in the future. Now in her 20s, Sophia is a capable, cut-throat fighter, on the hunt for the treasure that lurks deep inside the extensive cave network of Crete – the home, according to Greek mythology, of the bull-headed Minotaur.
In tone, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a long way off the dour machismo of Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey adaptation. Rather than brooding, greyscale landscapes, Asobo delivers a Crete that, at least initially, seems lifted directly from holiday brochures: soft sandstone cliffs, swallows dancing in the evening light, vivid green vegetation tangling around crumbling statues. Some of the most striking sights arrive via the Minoan frescoes: their deep oranges and eye-popping yellows have not faded but remain ebulliently bright.
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