Returnal is a game I never thought I would beat. It's first stage and boss are so brutal I feel most players will spend most of their total playtime stuck here. Once you start to master the game and beat the first boss, the rest of the game starts to come significantly easier. Because of this extreme difficulty curve its hard for me to try to convince people who have given up on it to try again. They will most likely fail, and fail, and fail until hours later when they finally get it. I can't in good conscious say to those people struggling here that they have to or should suffer through this in order to make it through to the end. But, if somehow you do claw your way out of the first stage like Selene fighting through this impossible loop, I think the game is absolutely special and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I beat it.

The art direction in this game is absolutely mesmerizing. Glowing flora and fauna in a dark rainy forest, a giant lifeless desert that hides a tall mountain among its rock formation and sandstorms, gigeresque city scapes that blend mechanical veins with stone, its all done fantastically well. I loved being in the ever-shifting world of Returnal, and I feel sad that the difficulty/pacing of the game had me spend so much more time in the forest rather than the later areas.

Gameplay is fast paced and addicting, and while it gets easier to overcome the more you play it, it never becomes easy. It demands your attention all the way through. The bullet hell attacks are done in cool shapes and styles and keep the pressure on always. The bosses, despite them being very few, were all absolutely fantastic in design and mechanics. After I beat this game, I wanted to play more. The story was also a very unexpected plus for me in the end.

I wont spoil the entire game's story here on a review, but while I was expecting much more concrete progression in the logical events of the story, I was instead given something more unexpected. The story is like the world, illogical and impossible to fully understand, but the focus of the story is much more interested in the emotions of the player and the character. Symbolism, allusion, and subtext are king when it comes to putting everything together. I haven't played a game that pulled off a story quite like this ever. It's very impressive with what they were able to tell with what little direct story telling they provide.

All in all I loved this game. I can't in good consciousness give it a perfect review because of the issues with difficulty and pacing I outlined in the first paragraphs, but I would have no problem recommending this game to anyone with a PS5.

-PS, the adaptive trigger alt fire is EASILY the best and most innovative feature I've seen with a controller ever and I'd love to see more of it.

What dreadful melancholy. It's rare I play a game that makes me feel this morose. Maybe not since Silent Hill 2 has a game just made me feel like stomped shit. What begins as "Can I escape this planet?" slowly, and even agonizingly, becomes "Can I escape myself?" I don't want to get into spoilers, but this is simply not what it seems on the surface and is one of the most thematically rending games I've ever played. There's a method to this looping madness.

To gameplay itself: just excellent. I was worried about playing this on PS5 with a controller rather than PC where my skills are much better with a keyboard and mouse, but Housemarque perfectly tuned the style to controller. The dualsense feels perfect, the use of the adaptive trigger to switch to alt-fire is just brilliant really and the best I've seen any developer use the tech. Sometimes you get absolutely stomped, pelted by a million bullets. But other times you rip and tear these levels to pieces with your sword and weaponry. It feels intensely satisfying to stomp those early levels that gave you trouble.

I don't really have criticisms outside the clear positive feedback loop that comes from most roguelites. It's hard to knock the endless loop as "playing the same thing over and over" because of how in-tune this is thematically with the game. What a breath of fresh air, what a pleasant surprise, what a god damn nightmare.

Yeah, it's a brutally tough roguelike inevitably inhering the divisive traits of the genre, striking a tricky balance between that adventurous excitement of every new run and the frustration of progress beholden to RNG. All that being said, Returnal is my favourite PS5 exclusive so far, one of the most conceptually ambitious titles PlayStation Studios has published in years and one of the highlights of the year. A beautifully surreal cosmic horror narrative encases absurdly tight gunplay set in visceral arenas. Both blisteringly modern in its flaunting of particle effects and non-existent load speeds but deliciously old-school with its callbacks to bullet-hell classics like Ikaruga and coin-op shmups begging you to give them one more go. The more I played, the more I came to appreciate its unique design, its obscure storytelling, its ruthless difficulty. Moments of frustration paled in comparison to the ridiculous highs I felt during far greater portions of the game. A brilliant achievement by Housemarque and gave me a bit of faith in the industry once again.

Returnal. Is a great game, and I absolutely recommend it.

For my roguelite enthusiasts, I'll put it this way. Imagine a AAA game built loosely around the Commando and their kit from Risk of Rain 2. Give the bosses Dark Souls levels of difficulty. String the areas together as if it were an action RPG. Boom. That'll get your mind pretty close to how Returnal plays, and man, it is fun.

One reason to enjoy it: The gameplay is so tight and refined. I played on a PS5 controller and thought that might impair how I normally play with M&K but it didn't. Guns feel impactful and all the while the music increases in intensity as the tension rises, as you attempt to clear rooms and waves of enemies without taking damage. It creates amazing spectacle encounters in every room and can often make you feel the pressure of your potential demise. Sure, there are still times you can live out your power fantasy (as roguelites tend to let you do), as an unkillable god-being, but it's these intense runs facing death itself that make your spontaneous god-runs feel oh so satisfying.

The other part about Returnal that really made me fall in love with it is the mystery. The more you play the more you (think you) understand. You'll find glyphs in your run and slowly translate them into strange little conundrums. You'll find ruins of civilization and strange creatures inhabiting this odd world. Death is a part of the lore as well, so you're trying to understand the time loop. Just when you think you understand this game it gives you a well-earned reveal that changes your entire perspective. Not everything is as it seems. The twists in here go harder than freakin' Shamylan and I lived for them. I wish I could share more, but it's just best if you find these glorious moments yourself... and trust me. Understanding more about the game will just cheapen the experience. It is a wild and exceptionally good ride.

That being said there is more for me to experience in Returnal that I have not experienced quite yet (2023 has been unpredictably amazing in terms of releases which has pressed me for time), but I don't think completing these will change my opinion. I certainly intend to return (heh) soon of course. They can't just tout a "true ending" without me finding it. But just know my marked 21 hours isn't the reaaal end of the game.

I imagine most will complete the campaign in about 25 or so hours, and on top of that, you have the endless mode which is incredibly satisfying as well. Capitalizes on the speed and thrill of combat without the travel time that can make the "metroid-ing" around the campaign a little tiresome from moment to moment. Also has its own conundrum of a narrative it follows, which is quite cool. Aside, but co-op was something I wanted to try, but never got around to. Would probably be fun.

As far as some lower notes go: Ran into one unavoidable bug that is 100% replicatable and happens every time (I posted about it in community forums and their website). Not the greatest PC port in general really. It worked for me way better than other reviewers but YMMV. I also... had a difficult time with the time allotment this game presents itself with. What I mean by that is... If I'm not sure I'll be gaming uninterrupted for like 2 hours I won't even bother to turn on Returnal paha. You can save and quit during a run at any time... but every time I do that in other roguelites I come back and die, so I'm incentivized per my own experiences to play one run all the way through to completion. Returnal is VAST. Runs can take hours. If you're stingy like me on saving and quitting you'll find it a bit difficult in that way as well.

But overall this is such an awesome game, with so many incredible high notes. The gameplay and progression feel great, the narrative mystery is excellent, and the presentation is absolutely top-notch. Because of the bugs and the lack of support on PC, it would be wise to wait for it to go on a bit of a deeper sale, but seriously, if you're looking for your next roguelite fix, I'm telling you right now, Returnal is a game you're not going to want to miss.

Rouge-likes don't have to be doomed to a pit of mid-tier or just fun afternoons.

When you've got arenas this good to compliment combat this great, everything else is just a bonus.

And boy howdy what a bonus. Atmosphere is off the charts and art design is so stellar. The alien ruins never stopped being a sight to behold and the sound design never lets up it's brilliance. Evokes all the best parts of the Metroid series.

Really this could have been a case study for Metroid Other M on how to translate 2D metroid to 3D properly.

Even when I was getting my ass handed to me, I still loved every second here.

It's quite rare that I feel compelled enough by a roguelike to actually complete it, but I really enjoyed a lot about this game. The core gameplay is super fun and satisfying, with a ton of variety in enemy design to keep things interesting. Weapons are very varied as well, but only like half of them are actually viable choices. The electropylon weapon is so far above everything else though. It can straight up melt bosses without you even needing to aim properly lol.

I think the game is far more engaging in its early stages compared to later on however. Learning all the enemies and the fundamentals of the maps are very fun, and the first boss was the only one that really gave me any difficulty. That being said, the bosses on the whole are very solid in terms of visuals and spectacle, but most of them don't really pose much of a threat, the final one especially, which was quite disappointing.

Also, I feel like it was a really odd choice to have the game "finish" after act 2, when it doesn't really offer much of a conclusion at all. I would definitely advise people to finish act 3 if you want to get the most out of the story. Even then though, it's still very confusing and not explained particularly well. I did love most of the storytelling in the game though. There's lots of super interesting and surreal storytelling methods used and it really made me want to keep playing, even when I felt like the game was getting a bit repetitive towards the end (a common problem I have with roguelikes).

after like 2 months of playing it on and off, I'm gonna have to shelve this one.

This is a good and fun game, but one that just requires so much time put into it and so much dedication to it if you want to beat it. And that's fine, I've just found myself bored of the repetition.

So the problem with this game is that it's a rogue-lite, yet every run feels exactly the same. The modifiers aren't substantial or unique enough to change things up. Every run is pretty much the same thing.

So, when I'm 2+ hours deep into a run and I just randomly die by some random enemy, I'm sent back to the start and have to basically do the exact same 2+ hour process again. It is fucking grueling.

The shooting is fun, the mechanics are all there, the story is super interesting, it's all great stuff, but man I don't have it in me to do another super long session only to accomplish literally nothing.

Also the first time I made it to that icy cave biome, I jump down to this area that game clearly led me towards, only to find I literally cannot get out of the area and thus my run is completely over. Another 2+ hours wasted.

I really want to emphasize that this game has plently of good aspects and I understand why so many have this at 5/5 or 4.5/5s, but the rogue-lite aspects are just really repetitive and grueling to play through, and I simply don't have the motivation nor the time for it. Bye!

On a moment to moment level, terribly fun and engaging, but the more time I spend with it, the more my frustration grows.

Malfunctions are generally either meaningless or ruinous (especially when it can be entirely beyond your ability to fix), attacks can hit you from across the room or phase through a wall (with warning, yes, but hard to parse in the moment, especially if you're dealing with other chaos), the tracking of certain enemy attacks feels overturned in speed and/or accuracy, and worst of all, they've admitted the team didn't have a shared and cohesive vision of the story. There's a big difference between intentionally crafted ambiguity that allows you to take the meaning that is meaningful to you, and just throwing a mish mash of aesthetic ideas that look cool together. On top of that, runs are bit too long for how many times they want you to repeat this experience, the idea of actually unlocking all weapon traits or logbook entries is exhausting. I really wish they would have halved the biome lengths, especially if that would have allowed them to add another act.

But, despite all of the above, again, it's very fun!

Yeah idk. I was excited for this, and I thought I enjoyed roguelikes after playing Hades, but I hate that there's very little progression during runs with this one. I don't want to spend hours working my way through a level only to be one-shotted and then restart with nothing to show for my previous run.

I also do like games with a challenge, but I want there to be ways to overcome that instead of just pure skill and learning enemy patterns. I think one of the reasons I enjoy challenge in games like SoulsBorne is because there's more to it than just learning enemy patterns (leveling up, getting items that could help with an enemy/boss/area). Returnal doesn't have any of that so I'm not motivated enough to keep playing run after run.

I think I made it halfway through the game (third biome)? I don't feel like playing it any more. It's not really a bad game though. The gameplay is solid, the visuals are amazing, and I'm intrigued by the story. But it's just unsatisfying between runs and it's not my cup of tea.

Didn’t expect to finish this in 2021 but here I am.

When you dive into Returnal, you are first taken by the incredible art direction, moody, Gigerish environments with an over abundance of particles and detail in the landscape. For a while I simply soaked in the atmosphere, some of the best in gaming. Then you really play it and you’re met with an over the shoulder bullet hell roguelite like a 3D enter the gungeon. Then you die. And like any good roguelite that happens a lot. You die and loop, die and loop and gain knowledge, permanent upgrades and grow a pool of items to help you get further and further.

It felt like this game was going to take ages to beat, and I briefly considered adding it to my rotation of Roguelikes I play, just picking it up here and there. But much like Hades, it’s narrative and mysteries it sets before you make it to where beating this is incredibly rewarding. Unlike other Roguelikes where narrative is an afterthought, it ties several of the mechanics into the story and rewards you abstractly for your effort in this regard. PT-style story sequences where you piece together clues of Selene’s background and the mysterious forces affecting her.

The resolution wasn’t super clear, but it does play it’s hand well throughout.

I would advise anyone scared off by its difficulty to stick with it as not only does it seem to soften its difficulty at the halfway point, it really does just take that big of roguelite luck and building to breeze through it. I was stuck in the first area for a long time, the next a little shorter, then rapidly went through the rest.

I feel like due to the type of thing it is, the scarcity of ps5s and some of its peers it’ll be relatively slept on but I think this is a great title to help justify my poor decision of early adopting a ps5.

Não sou muito fã de roguelike ou lite, mas esse jogo me surpreendeu bastante devido a sua gameplay rápida e precisa, o gênero torna o jogo muito desafiador porém não apelativo, ritmo muito bom e muito divertido de jogar, com a adição do coop, que foi como eu joguei, se tornou uma experiência bem memorável, a história é um pouco complicada de entender, porém a progressão e a jogabilidade misturada a bons gráficos faz esse jogo ser uma experiência bem interessante para quem busca um desafio seja solo ou coop. Jogasso!

Returnal: Creative Story-Telling with Great Challenge

So I am going to be honest. I picked up this game blind not knowing anything about it. This is now going to be one of my favorite games of all time, and at worst it makes the top 10 in my list of all time greats.

Returnal tells the story of Selene who is stuck within a time loop, dying and returning to the site of her crash. She doesn't know why she is stuck in the loop, but she presses on exploring the alien planet known as Atropos. You fight off various alien lifeforms and proceed to discover what has caused you to be within this loop via flashbacks, hallucinations, and audio logs from her past self.

This is my first time playing a rougelike for more than five minutes and not getting bored. Usually I am very picky about my games, but I got this on a whim and was hooked instantly. A story that has you guessing what will happen next is something I have been missing in the game department. Every new audio file I grab I would sit and listen for any new information on the story. Also scenes within the house were always keeping me on the edge of my seat to figure out what would come next. Even after beating the game I was not able to figure out the story until I sat down and did some hard thinking and looking at other people’s thoughts. I am not saying the story is terrible, but it has a lot of different paths that could be interpreted depending on the person. I do think there is one correct answer, but you will need to dig a bit for it. The thinking and steps to figure out a game and piece together all of it was probably one of my favorite parts about this game. The story-telling is top notch, and for me that is naturally the most important part of any game for me.

The gameplay feels so smooth. I typically hate shooters, but when I pick up the controller I could not set it down. The movement and haptic feedback is top notch and shows off what this console can do. You not only hear raindrops on the controller, but you feel them too. I felt immersed in this gameplay without the headphones, and when I put them on. I can only describe it as the perfect immersion within the game.

The only thing I would even gripe about, and in the game it makes sense mostly, is the difficulty scaling. I think I struggle mostly on the third biome, while I can blow through the final biome not taking any damage. This is mostly due to attributes on the guns, which you get some VERY broken ones later on. And from what I see, there is a cap to certain proficiency levels in each biome. Once you hit 15 or higher, the game felt a little easier. You gain these levels by killing enemies and finding items that boost it. So the longer your run, the better. But it does not ruin it as you need to be able to juggle multiple enemies a lot and these attributes to guns help stay in the fray and no power-up will ultimately help you skimp on mechanics.

Overall, 5/5 a mastapiece and now I am going to jump back in now to platinum this game

I started hating this game. It felt unfair and impossible to get through...until you beat the first boss and realize that the first part of the game is substantially harder than the rest.

The weapon variety is nice but most of them don't hold a candle to both the Carbine and Hollowseeker which are far above the rest due to their fast DPS and perks such as Leech Rounds which border on broken.

Aside from that, this is a great game that I wish Playstation were publishing more of its kind. Fast pace, brutal gameplay with great enemy variety and a good implementation of a skill ceiling, despite the aforementioned unbalanced progression.

It actually bums me to feel this way about the game, as I love sci-fi, I love time loop stories, and the one roguelike I've played before (Hades) I fucking loved. Roguelikes are still a new genre for me, obviously, and now I'm wondering how much of what Hades does so well is a byproduct of Hades rather than the genre.

My first problem with Returnal is the length of runs. It's insane sometimes, in Hades even your longest, completely successful runs aren't as long as a Returnal run, hell you can even spend an hour in one biome alone if you're exploring it all for better loot, resources, etc. My second problem with Returnal is the level of RNG, in Hades, you pick your weapon before the run, and can have some control over your god boons both with the first one you get and then by choosing the doors that YOU want. In Returnal you can also choose doors but beyond them being a safe room or challenge room you can't exactly tell what's going to be in there for loot. It can be frustrating when you get bad RNG in Returnal.

Returnal's gameplay itself lacks in comparison in my opinion, but I'm down to call that one just a personal preference. The narrative is not anywhere near as much of a strength as Hades either. In the end, the overall package just doesn't serve as satisfying for me here. It feels much more frustrating than a game like Hades, if you lose a run you lose much more of a time commitment than you do in Hades. If you get bad RNG it hurts way more than it does in Hades. I recognize that it might not necessarily be fair to just compare this game to Hades, but when they're both the same genre, this one costs $50 more, and has a higher budget, maybe I got too high of expectations. Maybe I got lucky with Hades being my first roguelike and now they will never live up to that for me, maybe I have wrong expectations now, or maybe these are just Returnal specific problems. With a sample size of two, I am not sure yet, but man I wish I was playing Hades.

Banger? Returnal's moment to moment gameplay as essentially a roguelike third person bullet hell is second to none. Fights are fast, hard, exhillerating. Traversal and mobility feels great. Builds vary enough to allow for experimentation and variance between runs. Finished off with some really strong bossfights (the guy playing the Organ is an all time great).

Wrapped into a mystery plot that stays vague, but gives you enough concrete information to theorize and interpret. the narrative sequences themselves are skillfully directed and lean into horror-vibes just the right amount.

The roguelike nature can be curse as well as blessing. Runs get long which means dying to a boss (looking at the 3rd biome here) can wipe out an hour+ of progress. While you unlock shortcuts, not all of them are viable as combing through every room of every level for upgrades is the optimal play, maximizing your chances of beating the boss this time. This leads to some pretty severe lulls in pacing, both gameplay and narrative, that drag down the overall experience a bit.

I think I’m done with expecting things from summations, or rather, from explications of quality derived from experientialist assessment, in video games criticism. Time and time again, I hear someone or some article wax languidly on the pertaining of an ur-secret amalgamation to any game’s individual alchemy that renders a feeling of unique golden sublimity within software; washes of copper green roof tiling flaked away on the controller, colonnades, or keyboard - an unstiffening from historical input that has become a coral encrusted cloister of routine, religiously cycling through 1-1s or Dust 2s in place of rapture - that reveal the lithe and heavenly joisted, divinely scaffolded, intelligently designed liquid azure which creates the game of life under the crackling veins of half real, half gone painted cages. I hear this proselytising, from street corners and from the corners of the internet, and I rush to play Control because of The Ashtray Maze, or Titanfall 2 because of Effect and Cause, or Mankind Divided because of Prague. I sit in a pew, plug in for 6 hours to wait for that divine spark to reach me, and then once I pass through the sizzling whizz and shimmer of the Roman Candle’s burst, I am left like Eve and Adam and Michaelangelo: somehow apart, despite appearances, from that touch that seemed prevalent to others and made for us all. Maybe it’s beautiful, or maybe poorly restored, but it’s nevertheless the heavenly host hosted online.

That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.

The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.

I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.

FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.

The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.

There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above

- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.

- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.

- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.

Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.

To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.

Returnal somehow still stands in 2023 as one of very few genuinely current-gen-native video games, and you can tell. The graphics are slick, full of shaders, particles, and lighting that underscores its otherworldly vibe. It takes full advantage of the DualSense's haptics to make the game as tactile as it is visual—the half-trigger alt fire mode is particularly impressive in its fluidity of adding what's effectively an extra virtual button to the controller.

My problem is simply that I don't like shooters all that much. All the genuinely challenging fights in this game put a lot of weight onto the player's skill at shooting while dodging and weaving, and I'm neither great at that nor particularly interested in it. In some games, the roguelike design would help compensate for this by giving me the opportunity to assemble a synergy build that can simply overpower enemies despite my middling skill, but that's not Returnal: the build customization here doesn't have the multiplicative scaling necessary to really tap into that mode of play.

So I made it to the final boss of the second biome, died with the last shred of its health remaining, and will probably never return to this game.

I have been putting off playing Returnal simply due to the idea that it would be hard, but now that I finally got around to it I'm annoyed I didn't play it earlier. It is a hard game but the game's mechanics are so good and the combat is so rewarding that the difficulty doesn't hurt the game at all. Another aspect of the game that is sneaky good is the narrative. They don't hold your hand through the story, but really expect you to put all of the pieces together to gain a full understanding. I'll be honest, I didn't get the second ending yet, but I wanted to get this review out since I did get the credits and wanted to get a word out there since there are a lot of games coming up that I want to play. I will definitely go back and finish the true ending soon in the future simply because Returnal is a fantastic game.

Returnal stays great. Everything I loved about this game on PlayStation 5 absolutely holds up and it was a blast playing through this game again. It's just unfortunate that this PC port appears to have added some bugs which I never experienced on the original version. I have a high tolerance for most bugs, but when progression is concerned, I have zero tolerance. This game has a nasty habit of going to a black screen and killing your run entirely. I also personally experienced some performance issues which made certain fights more challenging than they should've been. In spite of these issues, I still had a great time revisiting Returnal and I'm excited to see what Housemarque does next.

Great game with underwhelming ending. The story was so intriguing only to fall apart in the end. I’d not be so disappointed if this was a normal game, but the fact that we have to slog so so SO HARD to get here and this is what you end up with? It feels all that time is wasted somehow. If it was a regular game with the same story I’d give it a 4/5. But this is unforgivable. But Returnal did change my life in one way, in that i finally understood playing games is about having fun not stressing out & being nervous. I legit never felt so nervous and scared playing a game and you’ll see this sentiment mirrored with your fav YouTube creators too, if you don’t believe me checkout their walkthroughs. Anyway all the nerves and scares have come undone because of the story and finale. I cannot tell you in words how frustrating it is. Only people who have played this game and died repeatedly will understand my angst lol

So in conclusion after platinuming Sekiro years ago and Returnal being my First hard game since,i finally understood, games are about fun and relief not brutality and unforgiving challenging. Life is difficult enough, maybe I’m just getting old and i don’t enjoy this kind of games anymore. In conclusion, Returnal is like a salty ex who I hate but Appreciate at the same time because it showed me what I should look for (in games) in the future. Thanks Returnal and Goodbye :)

Gameplay is super fun and solid. A single run is generally really good. But I think the game lacks rewarding bonuses for good runs.

Maybe I was just spoiled by Hades being my first rogue-like. The fact Returnal offers zero rewards for a run that doesn't happen to get to a new biome just lends to way more frustrating time wasting than anything. It'd be nice if I could upgrade things permanently with ether, like extra dashes or starting health. In Hades your 10th run will always be much stronger than your first run regardless of that runs loadout, simply because of those upgrades you can get, meaning no matter how many times it takes you to beat the game, you're always progressing. In Returnal dying in a 2 hour run without making biome progress is just too punishing. Even making it to a new biome isn't that rewarding, because all it does is give you a new piece of equipment that will allow you to gather a handful of extra resources per run.

I never even felt like I was really improving in this game. Obviously you learn enemies movesets and such, but some rooms are just so ridiculous that all you can do is dodge around the thousands of bullets coming your way between the mini bosses leaping at you to take off 60% of your health in a single hit, and thanks to the 3D gameplay it is physically impossible to keep track of everything at once. It was very much a case of spam dodge and hope to God I don't accidently dash straight into an enemy in a blind spot.

Even worse is that the game has this mechanic where if you spend Ether on a fabricator at the start of a run it'll be added to the loot pool in future runs (there are other ways to add items, but this was the most common). The game seems to THINK this is the way to help players each run but...it's not. The amount of chests and whatnot each run remain the same, and in fact the amount you can actually access will differ wildly due to RNG keys, so getting a less-than-optimal new item added to the pool just lowers your chance of getting the item you want. It can literally punish you and make future runs harder. They should really have made artefacts be a random drop from enemies sometimes - at the very least mini bosses.

And since ethers are the only permanent resource that carries between runs, you might think "Well I'll just do a bunch of suicide runs to gather ethers so I can do a great run where I can avoid all malfunctions", but the game stops that by capping the ether amount to 30.

I dunno. Returnal is so incredible to actually play. It's tense, fast paced and just feels good. It has an interesting use of the adaptive triggers by making alt fire and aiming down the sight different levels of pressing L2. But it's also just so PUNISHING for death and it lead to so much frustration, not because I was mad I died, but because I was mad I'd just lost hours of my life. The only really good thing I have to say about this system is that the feeling I got upon beating the last boss was one I haven't experienced in a game for a long ass time. I was literally shaking from the anxiety of dying and having to do it all again. But was that worth all the crushing realisations that I'd just wasted so many hours of my life on every death? Lol.

I haven't touched on the story because I don't really care for it. I'm not a fan of those kind of mystery stories where things are presented to the viewer as purposefully obscure and the character experiencing it constantly has flashes and experiences nonsensical things so the player can put pieces together. I've read at least 3 different theories on what the whole thing means and a story that has to be told by the fans, and even then they can't agree on it, just doesn't captivate me. Luckily the story mostly takes a backseat, but I admit the house sequences were low points.

I really enjoyed this game for what it was. It felt kind of like a Metroid Primeish Roguelite with really great art direction and atmosphere. Not to mention the sound design is incredible. The mid game twist was really clever and I had an audible wtf moment with how well the story beat played into the core gameplay element. I think my only gripe would be that some enemies felt kinda of cheap, namely enemies that had giant tracking melee attacks from really long range as well as the enemies that would shoot constant purple lasers. Though I guess that's what gives the game its bullet hell feel.
Also, I feel like this game is the best example of using the Dualsense controller tech to its max potential. Alt firing with the haptic triggers felt so good and the HD rumble was so detailed.