Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy takes no time getting into the good stuff. The back half of the preview demo had us running and jumping up a collapsing Cretan ruin, hurling this story’s new protagonist – Sophia – from one crumbling ancient pipe to the next while a monster best left unspoiled hunted us through the dark below. A half-hour earlier, we were fighting armed mercenaries in the sun, planting well-placed daggers into swaths of foes while solving intricate puzzles, and following a treasure map to find the next clue. This is the essence of Asobo Studio's third trip into its plague-soaked world, and the preview build ran us two nailbiting hours across two gorgeous chapters ahead of its upcoming August launch. Of course, if you've touched a Plague Tale game before, almost none of that will sound right. Where Amicia spent two games hiding in the grass, smuggler Sophia is far more athletic and trained for danger, and it plays less like a full-blown stealth puzzler than like Assassin's Creed crossed with Tomb Raider. On this evidence, it's the best the series has ever felt in our hands.

Ship of Theseus

Story and action share the center stage in this iteration of A Plague Tale, so let’s start with the action. Sophia carries a blade in each hand, a sword on the right and a dagger on the left, and boy howdy, is she quick. After two games of creeping around as Amicia, it's almost disorienting to control a Plague Tale lead who actively wants to be seen this badly, though there is still plenty of stealth. You launch basic attacks with X, hold X to charge a critical strike that pulls the dagger for a stabbing finisher, kick with Y to break an enemy’s guard, and dodge with B. Tap the left bumper to parry – which eventually stuns enemies if you do it enough times in sequence – and hold it to block.

It’s a little disappointing she doesn’t have much more ranged versatility than that, but you do get a cool gadget: tapping the left trigger fires a grappling hook that drags an enemy in and leaves them off balance, open to a one-hit critical. And there are other opportunities for strategy as well; for instance, if you get the drop on a roving band of human enemies, you can leap onto unsuspecting foes and tap X for an Assassin's Creed-style execution. Time-to-kill is short, and time to regenerate your own health is pretty quick, which keeps fights moving regardless of whether you land perfect takedowns and receive no incoming hits. Still, Sophia folded after about three consecutive hits on Normal difficulty in the section we had the opportunity to play through, so it definitely seems like the best offense here is a good defense.

Bigger swings are telegraphed with color-coded warnings, typical in modern action games, so a clean parry is always about reading the tell, not guessing. The biggest enemies can't be parried or stunned at all, so you'll need to wait out their onslaught, slip in behind them, and repeatedly hold X until they drop. This is fantastic when combat is firing on all cylinders, with swords, spears, and arrows flying through the air in all directions.

Once you start chaining grapples into executions, it clicks, and dropping a small army plus a few bruisers never stops feeling good. Every so often, you can smash the Y + X buttons at once to unleash a superpowered, limit break-style attack that defaults as a big 360-degree AoE swing, shooting golden particles everywhere. It breaks through everyone's armor, but its effect seems to change based on which sword Sophia has equipped. In addition to that big attack, switching from Sophia's basic sword tweaks the rhythm in small but significant ways: the Greek sword (found in a random, off-the-beaten-path tomb) swaps that long-X dagger finisher for a single spinning slash, and it feels just as slick in action.

Many of Resonance's puzzles run on a mysterious sphere that triples as Sophia's flashlight.“

In total, there are about eight weapons to find throughout the campaign, which feels just right for what promises to be a densely-packed single-player action-adventure that fills each level with mesmerizing environmental art, enthralling puzzles, and intricate action sequences. It's easy to be so absorbed by the ancient Cretan world for lengthy sequences between fights that you might forget the existence of combat altogether – until you're suddenly emerging into a band of troops guarding the exit to one of Resonance's plethora of forgotten temples.

Aziz, More Light!

Many of Resonance's puzzles run on a mysterious sphere that triples as Sophia's flashlight, a puzzle-solving device that splits a beam of light into green, red, and blue refractions, and the story's prime MacGuffin – sort of like Baldur's Gate 3's Astral Prism meets Alan Wake's trusty flashlight. You solve rooms by routing those colored beams into gems set in the walls, which crack open doors or raise platforms out of bottomless pits. In other sections, you'll simply need light to survive the monster. Yes, there's a monster, and yes, it's related to the titular plague. This is the prequel to A Plague Tale, after all, and its deeper mythological connections make it both a fantastic starting point for the series and, from what we've seen so far, its implications for the first two games will make it a must-play for longtime fans.

Most puzzles take about ten minutes of trial and error, and dying barely stings: you rewind a few seconds, and autosaves are everywhere, at least on Normal mode. Again, that balance between fighting and thinking was one of the smartest things about the demo. One of the more memorable puzzles we encountered had us aiming three big magnifying lenses to chain light across a chamber in the right order, and the answer is rarely the one it first looks like. In another, companion Leni braces a set of wheels to hold platforms in place while you work the light, which is also where the writing snuck in for us. Sophia and Leni have an easy, lived-in banter, and we got exactly one chapter with her before a cutscene tore her away, by ex-friends-turned-enemies, no less, who were implied to have once been allies in earlier sections of the story, and I imagine these supporting characters will be pivotal to the plot of the full game.

Resounding Applause

You grow Sophia’s abilities with Resonance Points, which you find in the environment or earn after a fight. There are six unlockable skills total, but the preview opened up three. Echo's Return supplements your parry: press B as you're hit to snatch the attacker and fling him into his allies, stunning the whole group. It won't catch yellow or red attacks without an upgrade, but it's a great-looking move, with Sophia swinging a hapless soldier into the fray like a bowling ball.

Bullbreaker Kick, mapped to a double-tap of Y, chains into a second kick that stuns and shoves enemies back. Each skill has two mutually exclusive masteries that sharpen it further. For example, Echo's Return can learn to answer an otherwise unworkable yellow attack, and Bullbreaker Kick can pile on extra stun when an enemy hits something solid. All skills cost more points the deeper you go, so your first pick matters, but you can reset the whole tree for free at any point, which takes the pressure off experimenting. Every tutorial stays parked in the menu if you need a refresher.

The island itself is the other reason this works. Asobo has built a handcrafted slice of Greece, – specifically, the island of Crete, where Sophia grew up – out of terracotta, with blue paint flaking off stone pillars, copper statues, murals, and ruins that genuinely look ancient. For anyone who's set foot on the Greek Isles, the place reads as authentic. And to its benefit, a rather well-thought-out story sits underneath all of it. Resonance takes place between 1333 and 1334, fifteen years before A Plague Tale: Innocence, and it keeps cutting back to antiquity, where you play as Theseus among the icons of Greek myth, and what happens in that past bends the present. Sophia seems to carry a sixth sense for this history, and the demo hints, without spelling it out, that Theseus may be her ancestor. The thread tying the two eras together is her link to the Prima Macula, the cursed bloodline the whole series is built on, and the build dangles that mystery without untangling it. Flip through her notebook on the d-pad, and you'll find unsettling, almost tabletop RPG-style drawings of maps and other mythical locations filling in her backstory. And then there's that monster I keep teasing, best left unspoiled, except to say it's cut from the same cloth as the menace of the first two games. It's the one stretch in the demo where stealth still mattered, and it built to the demo's tensest sequence, the tunnel chase teased at the beginning of this preview, where slipping past the thing in the dark was far better than fighting or even running away from it.

Toggle of War

Like any self-respecting PC player, we checked out the options menu, and Resonance's is deep – six tabs covering general, language, graphics, audio, accessibility, and controls. Hints are a slider (none, rare, common, or frequent) that changes how long before Sophia or a companion offers a nudge, and while switched to “common,” a hint rarely surfaces across these two chapters as long as you keep moving. In fact, we only saw it once while running circles around an early beachfront area during the first few minutes of the demo.

Invincible mode makes you immune to fire and human enemies, letting you walk through combat, though hazards and non-human threats remain lethal. This makes sense to cater to players of the first two games who may not be as into intense melee combat, but it probably unbalances the experience when switched on. There are colorblind presets, a high-contrast mode, fully remappable controls with on-screen prompts, and granular HUD toggles for enemy attack warnings, the creature indicator, and grapnel assist. Special actions that normally require a held input or a spun stick can auto-complete instead of asking you to mash, and you can dial back camera shake and vibration too. The build ran smoothly on a PC with an RTX 4070 Ti and an AMD Ryzen 3900X at 2K ultrawide, mostly on ultra with DLSS switched to Balanced mode and Frame Generation switched on.

Two chapters in, this is plainly the best A Plague Tale has ever played, the rare third entry that reinvents the formula instead of nudging it. The combat is fast and satisfying, the puzzles are clever without turning obtuse, the island looks and feels as encompassing as the most glorious environments from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and the skill tree has clear room to open up. Plenty is still unknown: how long the full game runs, how the dual-timeline story actually pays off, what that redacted threat becomes at full scale, and how much depth this combat system can really provide. For a series that made its name on dread and hiding, watching it commit this hard to action is a real surprise. But two chapters are certainly enough to make Resonance one of the most exciting things on our 2026 calendar, and that's not something I expected to say about A Plague Tale with a combat overhaul.