On a certain kind of dull, wet day, my dull, wet brain craves a particular sort of comfort: to burrow into the plush, numbing blanket of a middle-to-lowbrow thirdperson action-adventure. Blockbuster brawling, a light bit of puzzling, and an enviably sunny island idyll backdrop is all I ask. A little bit Uncharted, largely unchallenging and entirely unrepentant.

From a cursory glance at the trailers, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy presented as exactly this—at least to a fool, such as myself, who had not at that point played the previous, enthusiastically grim Plague Tale games, to which Resonance is a prequel. It is also a departure from their relentless filth and pestilence: a breezier action spectacle that hews closer to mainstream conformity, composed of the popcorn action-adventure staples I crave. There is brawling, puzzling and, yes, a stunning island idyll to explore. But then, just under half-way in, it abruptly decides it isn't content to coast on genre expectations and introduces a novel and horrifying element, a bit of systems-first enemy design that is so unguessably strange that I can't bring myself to spoil it in this review.