Resonance Beginner Guide

Short answer: Resonance drops you in as Sophia, a smuggler who is already good at her job. The opening hours are less about learning to survive and more about learning three tools — your blade, your light, and your notebook — and one habit: keep moving while you think.

Before you press start (PC only)

Two things are worth handling before your first session rather than during it.

• Storage: the game requires an SSD and 75 GB of free space. It is not a "works fine from a hard drive" title, and installing it somewhere slow is a problem you will feel during traversal, not at the menu.
• Stutter on the Game Pass build: if frame times spike while you walk around rather than sitting uniformly low, that is shader compilation, not weak hardware. A pre-generated shader cache for that build exists — see the mods page. Console players can skip both of these.

Everything else — resolution, upscaling, HDR — can wait until you have seen a fight. Our system requirements page has the full hardware tables.

Do you need to play the earlier games?

No. Sophia already appeared in A Plague Tale: Requiem, and this story takes place fifteen years earlier, but it is built to be her introduction rather than a continuation of someone else's plot. Requiem players will recognise the character, the Macula and one name in the credited cast; new players are not locked out of anything.

Fight forward, not backward

Sophia is built for close combat. She parries, dodges and lands heavy strikes, and enemies telegraph their attacks before they land. If you come from Innocence or Requiem expecting to hide from every encounter, the first fights will feel wrong — the game wants you to read the attack and answer it. Stealth still works when you want to lie low, but it is an option, not the rule.

The two habits worth building in hour one:

1. Parry the ordinary swings. It keeps you in the enemy's face and sets up the counter.
2. Dodge what the game marks differently. Community accessibility mods auto-parry ordinary and yellow-marked attacks and auto-dodge red-marked ones, which strongly implies a colour-coded telegraph. No official source in our material confirms the colour language, so treat it as community-reported, to be confirmed — but trust the underlying principle either way: some attacks are not meant to be parried.

Exact parry and dodge windows, and how difficulty options change them, are to be confirmed. We would rather leave that blank than publish timings we have not measured. The deeper breakdown is on our combat basics page.

Light is a tool, not decoration

Sophia carries a prism she treats as her most valuable possession, and on the island she picks up a stolen Minoan sphere that manipulates light on a much larger scale. The sphere is the key to the island's ancient machinery, and most environmental puzzles come back to putting light where it was not.

The prism has tactical uses too: channelling nearby firelight to create a lit area around her — an ability described as refracting — and setting grass alight to produce smoke that breaks line of sight. Treat both as verbs, not cutscene props. When a fight turns bad, leaving it and re-entering on your own terms is a legitimate play.

Use the notebook

Sophia keeps a crew notebook, and it is the game's built-in answer to "where do I go now". She is a ship's captain by trade — a navigator who works with tools and maps — and the notebook carries the clues she has gathered so far.

When a route stops being obvious, read the notebook and look around properly before you start brute-forcing doors. The island is a designed maze, credited in the fiction to the architect Daedalus, so the intended path usually exists and is usually marked by light, damage or something out of place. More on that habit on the notebook and exploration page.

Do not settle in

A restless presence hunts the island's depths. It tracks Sophia and forces a steady pace, which means standing still to plan is not free. Solve while walking; pick your thinking spots deliberately.

What the first chapters look like

The published chapter list is the best preview of the rhythm, because the subchapter names describe the beats. Chapter 1, Blood Ties, runs through a home, Faro's cabin, a search for a key, and a fighting pit — domestic setup, an objective hunt, then a combat set piece. Chapter 2, Felons, opens with an infiltration and a carnival before things go loud.

That is the loop in miniature: story beat, exploration problem, fight. Expect it to repeat with the island's machinery layered on from Chapter 4 onward. The full list is on our chapters page.

About collectibles and skills

Two things worth knowing early, both indirect but reliable:

• Collectibles are organised per chapter, and each chapter splits into subchapters you can replay individually. You do not need to sweep every room on your first pass — cleanup is a supported way to play.
• There is a progression system. A community mod exists purely to reduce the cost of every skill and specialization to one point, which tells us skills and specializations are bought with points. The shape of that tree and what to buy first are to be confirmed, so we are not sketching a build order.

Five habits that carry you through the opening

1. Read the attack, then answer it — do not open every fight by swinging.
2. Check the notebook before you check every door.
3. Look for what is unlit rather than what is locked.
4. Keep moving; the island does not pause while you plan.
5. Note where you saw something you could not reach, and come back via subchapter replay.

Still to be confirmed

Difficulty settings and what they change, button layouts on each platform, the skill tree, per-chapter collectible totals, average completion time, and whether a New Game Plus mode exists. We have not verified any of those, so you will not find them guessed at here.