Going in Blind: RESONANCE A Plague Tale Legacy’s Accessibility Feature Is Something I Have Never Seen Before

RESONANCE: A Plague Tale Legacy surprised me almost immediately. Before playing it, the only thing I knew about the A Plague Tale series was that it had a lot of rats and that you escorted your brother through France. That never made the series especially interesting to me. When I saw the trailer for RESONANCE, though, the Roman setting and gladiator-arena elements caught my attention. I am a big fan of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, so I wondered if this would offer a similar experience.

I expected to spend most of my time examining settings and looking for barriers. What I did not expect was to become emotionally invested within the first few minutes. I am not going to spoil the story, but an early moment legitimately made me cry. Usually, a game needs more time to build its characters before an emotional scene can affect me. RESONANCE did it almost immediately.

That emotional opening kept me engrossed throughout my playthrough. I reached about chapter three while focusing mainly on accessibility. Every new moment made me curious about the characters, the world, and the mystery. The story follows Sophia as she tries to reach a mysterious island with treasure. Her community does not want her to go, but she has a special ability that gives her visions. That is as much as I can say without spoiling the experience. I recommend going into the story as blind as possible, pun intended.

Accessibility settings

At the beginning of the game, RESONANCE presents a settings menu where you can change the difficulty, listening mode, speaker setup, language, subtitles, and accessibility options. The accessibility menu contains presets, including a standard vision preset, and you can customize the individual settings instead of relying only on a preset.

Players can steady the camera, use a static background, and adjust motion blur. These options may help anyone who finds camera movement or background animation difficult to process. Giving players control over these visual elements is a welcome part of the menu.

The game also includes controller remapping, which is especially important for players with motor disabilities. The combat made a strong impression. RESONANCE plays like an action-adventure game where you parry, dodge, and use special attacks. I mapped the parry command to the back paddle on my Xbox Elite 2 controller, which helped me pull off quick parries I might have missed in other games. The timing may be forgiving, but the result was fun. Breaking an enemy’s attack with a parry and following it with a proper attack felt satisfying, even while fighting multiple enemies. My experience with moving parry to a back paddle showed how changing an input can make combat more manageable and much more enjoyable. A control that is difficult in its default position can become comfortable when the game and the controller allow a different setup.

An impressive approach to color

The most distinctive accessibility feature is the color adjustment system. Many games provide colorblind filters. RESONANCE instead lets you adjust individual colors used throughout the game. You can change hue, saturation, and brightness, giving you much more control over what you can see.

The feature becomes even more useful during gameplay. At almost any point, you can open up the main menu and press a button for colour, and the game will open a photo mode-style screen. You can move and spin the camera, raise or lower it, view examples of the colours currently in use, and adjust each colour individually. If something in the environment is difficult to see, you can open the menu in that exact location and find a colour that works better for you. You can also hide the interface to examine the scene in more detail.

I have rarely seen colorblind accessibility handled this way. Dead Cells offered detailed colour adjustments in an accessibility update by adjusting Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, but the ability to enter a movable view from almost anywhere and tune colours against the current scene is something I have never seen before. It is practical, immediate, and worth highlighting.

High contrast mode

RESONANCE also has a high contrast mode. The player character appears blue, friendly characters appear green, and enemies appear red. Normally, if there’s a High Contrast Mode in games, the background is set to black and white when it’s enabled. In this game, they keep the background the same, and it’s just the character models that change colour. The colour shader has a lot more detail and shows off the character model more as well.

That detail matters because some high-contrast modes eliminate facial performance and other features of a character model. RESONANCE keeps more of that information visible, which makes the mode useful without completely removing the visual performance. For low-vision players, it works well by default.

There are limitations. High contrast mode is only an on-or-off setting. You cannot change the assigned colours, select different shades, choose between a shader and an outline, or adjust how the highlighting appears. The mode also remains enabled during cinematics, including in-game cinematics. I would prefer an option to disable it during those scenes so you can view the facial performances and presentation without the effect. The foundation is strong, but more customization would make it much better.

Subtitles, interface, and audio support

The interface generally uses decent icon sizes and contrast. Interaction prompts place a light icon inside a dark circle with a white outline. In bright environments, those prompts could use stronger contrast, but they are still reasonably clear.

Subtitle options include background opacity, speaker tags, and font size. Environmental dialogue from nearby characters is also subtitled by default. Players do not need to enable a separate option to receive that information. This is a thoughtful design choice for deaf and hard-of-hearing players because it keeps surrounding conversations available instead of limiting subtitles to major dialogue and cinematics.

Unfortunately, support for totally blind players is extremely limited. RESONANCE does not include a screen reader, navigational assistance, or audio descriptions for cinematics. Without those features, a totally blind player may need sighted assistance and still may not be able to play. The combat camera and Invincible Mode can reduce some barriers, but they do not replace spoken menus, navigation support, or descriptions of visual storytelling.

Invincible Mode and its language

Speaking of Invincible Mode, you can enable it, and it's off by default. But it protects the player against fire and human enemy damage. You can take hits without losing life, although other hazards and non-human threats remain deadly (think of falling off a cliff, it will reset you to the top of the cliff). This option can broaden access for players who have difficulty with combat, timing, or visual information. It may also make parts of the game more possible for blind players, even though the wider blindness accessibility is missing.

The problem is the message attached to the option. The game warns that activating Invincible Mode “degrades the experience.” I appreciate the feature, but I am not a fan of that language. Players who need an accessibility option should not be told that using it makes the experience worse.

Celeste handles assist options well by acknowledging the intended design while welcoming people who need a different way to play. RESONANCE could communicate the same idea without judging the player’s experience. The wording did not change my score, but it should be updated.

Final accessibility verdict

RESONANCE is not a perfect accessible game. It covers many of the basics and occasionally goes well beyond them, especially with its detailed colour system. The high contrast mode is effective, the subtitle settings are useful, environmental dialogue is included, controller remapping can make combat easier, and Invincible Mode reduces some barriers. The story, mystery, and combat also made the experience enjoyable beyond the settings menu.

At the same time, the missing screen reader, navigational assistance, and audio descriptions create major barriers for totally blind players. High contrast mode needs more customization, interaction icons could have stronger contrast, and the language around Invincible Mode should be more welcoming.

If any of those missing features are essential for you, I cannot recommend the game without assistance. If the available options meet your needs, however, RESONANCE is an easy recommendation. It has been a while since I played a game with accessibility that felt this thoughtful in several areas. I would like to see the studio improve the existing options and add more support through patches, updates, or future downloadable content.