A Plague Tale was a series with one unmistakable image: a girl, a torch, and a floor that moved because it was made of rats.
Resonance has no rats. It has no Amicia, no Hugo, and — by most accounts — very little stealth. The protagonist is Sophia, the setting has moved, and the combat is something you do on purpose rather than something you failed to avoid.
The review embargo lifted at 18:00 CEST today, a day before the game reaches PS5, Xbox Series and PC, and Game Pass on day one. Twenty published scores, averaging 8.5 on a 1-10 scale, with the full working at the foot of this piece.
The spread is the story
Four outlets landed on 7 or 7.5. Seven landed on 9 or above. Digital Chumps went to 9.5; GameRant, Push Square and Sirus Gaming stopped at 7.
That is a wide gap for a studio with Asobo’s consistency, and reading across them the disagreement is not really about execution. It is about permission.
The reviews at the top are judging a new action-adventure on its own terms and finding it very good. The reviews at the bottom keep measuring it against Innocence and Requiem and finding the absence. Neither is wrong. They are answering different questions, and the score is where that shows.
What the rats were actually for
Here is the part that interests me, and it is a production question rather than a taste one.
The rat swarms were never only a story device. They were Asobo’s technical identity — thousands of individually simulated agents, lit by the torch you were carrying, with the light doubling as the mechanic that pushed them back. Requiem pushed that count into the hundreds of thousands. It was the thing every preview led with, the thing every trailer showed, and the reason a mid-size French studio got talked about alongside much larger ones.
Building that costs years. It is not an effect you bolt on: it is simulation, rendering and design agreeing with each other, and once you have it, it becomes the thing your engine is for.
So a sequel that throws it out is spending an enormous amount of accumulated capability on nothing. Studios do not do that casually.
Which leaves two readings, and I do not think we can tell from outside yet. Either Asobo decided the swarm had become a cage — every scene had to justify rats, every level had to be a corridor lit by a torch — and paid the cost of leaving. Or the swarm was expensive enough that a game without it could be made faster and cheaper, and the pitch was built around the saving.
The first is an artistic decision. The second is a budget one. From the reviews alone they look identical.
The tell to watch for
There is one thing that would separate them, and it is visible in the game rather than in a press release.
If leaving the swarm behind was a creative choice, the technology should have gone somewhere else — crowd systems, weather, destruction, water, something that eats the same kind of compute and shows up on screen. A studio that spent five years building simulation expertise does not stop being good at simulation because it changed genre.
If the budget was simply smaller, the new game will look like a competent action-adventure with nothing in it that only Asobo could have built.
The reviews describing it as feeling like Assassin’s Creed or Tomb Raider are worth reading twice with that in mind. That comparison is a compliment about movement and a warning about identity at the same time.
Worth your time?
At 8.5 across twenty outlets, with 89% recommending on OpenCritic, this is plainly a good game — and it is on Game Pass from day one, which removes most of the risk from finding out.
The question worth asking yourself first is which of those two review camps you belong to. If Innocence and Requiem mattered to you because of what they were about, you will probably land nearer the sevens. If they mattered because Asobo is a studio that builds carefully, this is still that studio.
Scores collected from OpenCritic on 26 August 2026, roughly half an hour after the embargo lifted at 18:00 CEST, and converted to a 1-10 scale. The set will grow: the large English-language outlets had not filed at the time of writing, and their absence is why the average below is my own arithmetic on twenty published numbers rather than a settled consensus. Resonance reaches PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on 27 August.