By I put Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy through its paces on the Steam Machine, running it at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K to see how Valve’s new living-room box handles Asobo’s latest entry in the series. It’s a demanding game on paper, so I wanted to see exactly how much of that visual ambition survives the jump to SteamOS.
What Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Actually Is
This one is a prequel, set fifteen years before A Plague Tale: Requiem. I’m playing as Sophia, a plunderer who ends up uncovering secrets on the mythical Minotaur’s Island, with the story hopping between medieval times and ancient Minoan history. The mix is familiar if you’ve played the earlier games: melee combat with parries and strikes, light-based puzzles built around a Minoan sphere, and a mysterious creature stalking me through the island the whole way. Honestly, I never fully clicked with the earlier Plague Tale games, they always felt a little too slow for me, but the faster, more combat-focused pace here is winning me over.
1080p and 1440p Settings and Performance
At 1440p I mostly left things on the high preset without digging too deep into the graphics menu, and it held a steady 60 FPS with only the occasional dip. If you want that 60 completely locked down with no drops at all, dropping to a low-medium preset gets you there. At 1080p I had even more room to work with: I ran ultra settings and still hit 60 FPS easily, no compromises needed. Between the two, this is a game that’s very comfortable running natively on the Steam Machine.
Pushing Up to 4K
4K is where you have to start making trade-offs. With FSR set to Balanced and the preset dropped down to low, I was getting 30-plus FPS, which is a perfectly playable result for a game this visually heavy. If you want a locked 60 at 4K, you’ll need to turn on frame generation, which this game supports, and that gets you there without having to gut the settings any further. It’s not a one-size-fits-all resolution the way 1080p and 1440p are, but the option is there and it works.
Should You Play It on Steam Machine?
If you’ve been holding off on Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy until you knew how it runs on Valve’s new hardware, this is your answer: it’s a great time on the Steam Machine. 1440p on a high preset is my pick for the best mix of visuals and a steady 60, 1080p gives you a bit more headroom to push settings to ultra, and 4K is there and genuinely usable if you’re willing to lean on FSR and frame generation. Either way, this is exactly the kind of narrative-driven, visually heavy game I wanted to see the Steam Machine prove itself on, and it delivered.