Give me a game where I can hoof an enemy over the side of the cliff like a cut price Leonidas, and I'm happy. (It seems I'm not the only one.) So, yes, while I was sad to see no swarms of rats in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, I was very happy with the switch from stealth gameplay to scrappy melee. I might have been more worried going in if I knew just how little experience developer Asobo Studio have making combat games.
"Nobody did a combat game before Resonance," lead level designer Valérian Robert told me, and then he explained how they pulled it off.
"It was a lot to learn in terms of how you design space, how you design a combat mechanic because we didn't have any prior experience of that," Robert continued. "We had to draw inspiration from games such as Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro*, or Sifu to find our formula, find our style."
In Resonance, you play Sophia, a woman raised by plunderers. While she fights heavily armed and armoured soldiers, she leans into speed and dirty tricks to gain the upperhand. As well has hoofing her enemies over ledges, into pillars, or into each other, you can also grab bottles to smash over their heads, pull them off balance with your grappling hook, and generally use everything at hand to defeat them. It's in that which Sifu's influence is probably most clear.
That fighting style emerged as the team fleshed out Sophia's character. She was already a part of the Plague Tale series, though when you first meet her in Requiem, which is set 16 years after the events of Resonance, she is a pirate set in her ways. So in going back to an earlier time, they need to work out who she was as a younger woman. "We took a bit of time to know her character," Robert says. "We knew that she was part of a plunderer gang, but we didn't really know at the start how she would fight."
At first, the balance wasn't right. Asobo were aiming for "brutal combat" but they ended up with something much harder than they intended. "It didn't blend well with what the game was about," Robert explained. It still had to be a challenge and enjoyable, it wasn't only there to block your progress in the story, but the team were well aware their loyal players were coming from a stealth game. "We had to find the right balance to be challenging [but] players that are not familiar with the Souls game could really enjoy."
For the record, I am terrible at Soulslike games and, while I initially struggled with Resonance's combat, I quickly learned the ropes. The main challenge for cack-handed me was how little health you have. My recollection from the preview is that three good hits from an enemy can kill you, but if you're not great at timing your parries, smashing a bottle over an enemy's head is a great way to level the playing field. It leaves them stunned and pen for a good stab to the kidney.
It was already a lot of fun to play, but that it is the first time the studio have played with mechanics like this makes it all the more impressive.