This game shocks me, I was not expecting to be this good, i only buy it because it was a super cheap bundle it with my PS5. I'm not a rogue-like player, i only played DeadCells and Moonlighter before this and i drop those game in few hours. But this one feels so good, so addictive.
The gameplay is perfect, its fast, fluid and engaging.
The music is awesome, it totally get you in the mood and the sound design is top.
Biomes and enemies looks good.
Boss fights are incredible.
And everything is seasoned with a space mystery/horror story.

This is one of those game where everything works together just perfectly, every gear fit: gameplay, visual, sound and story works in harmony.

I got some complains:
First one is a personal thing, i'm a physical games dude, i want my games on disc/cart, i always buy physical and i always play the 1.00 version (the one on the disc) first. And this game 1.00 version is quite buggy, even game breaking bugs, i was not able to finish this game without update it because of 2 key items not spawning on the map.
Also the 3rd act of the game is kind of cheap grinding, but it's only for unlocking the True Ending, so I forgive it.

So my real complain with the game was the story, i like the ambiguity and mystery throughout the game, BUT, i want to finish the game and get answers... I achieve the True Ending and i still don't know WTF was going on. Way too cryptic, i'm not even sure the whole thing is not just a dream induced by Selene's traumas.

So, It would have been nice to have a good explanation at the end, I would have given it a perfect grade if that were the case, but anyway... The rest of the game's aspect are so good that i'm ok.

Very underated game.

Esse jogo é do caralho!!!
Acho que é o jogo mais equilibrado que joguei nos últimos tempos, tudo é na medida certa. Gameplay muito gostosa e divertida.

Eu achei a história extremamente confusa (talvez seja culpa minha) tive que ver um video para entender melhor e depois disso... é MUITO do CARALHO

se não fosse essa minha dificuldade de entender o enredo, seria perfeito pra mim

I wish we got more PlayStation exclusives like this. Returnal has equaled Hades as my favorite roguelike, though it has some major advantages over Hades. I prefer the combat, and the sensory experience of Returnal is fucking phenomenal. Seriously this game's visual, audio, and tactile feedback elevated this experience so much for me. My big issue with it has been the final half, it doesn't feel as strong as the first half. It's why I have yet to beat this game, and why I'm putting it away for now. If you're looking for a third-person shooter or roguelike that will utterly kick your ass, this is a great choice.

Delicious third-person shooting beset by questionable structuring and balance choices. Of the 20 or so runs it took me to complete this game, I would say that 16 or 17 of them ended either in the first biome or the first Act 2 biome. The game is as challenging as it claims to be when you're starting out and struggling to put your build together, but the large amount of drops per biome and relatively low item variety mean that you can quickly cobble together something that will carry you through the rest of the game as long as you don't get splattered from across the map by a fucking Titanops first. All it takes is rolling the dice enough times in the harrowing first twenty minutes of each run until you get Adrenaline Leech and/or a Hollowseeker with Portal Beam and then you're set.

I'm also not thrilled to be sitting through another story expressing "psychological horror" as a multivalent metaphor that's Actually About Trauma... does this stuff actually work on anyone other than the internet's most impressionable warriors anymore? It's exceptionally fertile ground for eisegesis; she has suffered and they have suffered and therefore the game is meaningful! Of course, the ability to understand (if not necessarily relate to) someone's circumstances is the fulcrum of character-based storytelling, but seeing Selene's threaded and rethreaded through Greek myth and Lovecraft and Dostoevsky and Dante and The Spooky Declaration of Independence is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book for the novice symbologist. Too much icing on the cake for me.

Also: top seed contender for the worst video game title of all time, right? It just sounds awful. Returdal. Returtle.

I ended up having to stop playing this game. Not because I wasn't having fun but because I just wasn't progressing. I really enjoyed the shooting. I thought it looked good and it felt good. I enjoyed my time with it. But unfortunately I'm just not good enough to beat these types of games. The randomness of it all is just too much for me. I understand that they don't want to put in an Easy Mode for people who don't wanna put the time in but I felt like I had maxed out all the weapons that I had available and all the traits and still wasn't able to progress. I made it to the 2nd noss a couple times but that was it. Maybe someday if this is still on PlayStation Plus I'll give it another try.
But for today I'm going to try something with a little bit more normal difficulty level

Never have I been so bad at a video game.

Returnal is a test of patience, willpower, stamina in addition to your gaming prowess. It puts you through the paces. It's a fun and aggravating experience. Unrelated to its difficulty, there are just a few drawbacks that keep a very good game from being a great game.

I would never suggest that I'm some godly gamer. Certainly, I'm not. I play most games on their normal difficulty as given to you when you start it up. Now if the appeal of a game is solely its difficulty, I might turn it up a bit and see where I can get. If I really enjoy a game and I'm playing it for the nth time I might turn the difficulty up a bit as well. I've beaten the Doom reboots on highest difficulties for the skill challenge and I've beaten all of the Mass Effects on their highest difficulties by virtue of having completed them a million times each.

But Returnal is still quite the challenge. Taxing. Rooms are ever changing, enemy compositions unchanging, endless gun RNG that changes what the guns even do. No two carbines are the same. This makes Returnal a tough task. It took me nearly 10 hours just to beat Phrike.

Once I beat Phrike I got some downhill momentum. It took me less time to beat Ixion and even less to beat Nemesis. Bit by bit I got a little better. But there were still endless deaths to random adds, falling off platforms or getting caught in those fucking hanging things. Returnal has no problem humbling the shit out of you once you get a little cocky.

If you are unfamiliar, Returnal is a roguelite. You spawn at your crashed ship with just a middling pistol. You have to shoot and loot your way through procedurally generated rooms and enemies. Collecting resources along the way to upgrade all of your gear and stats. Should you die however, you lose everything and are returned to the start with that middling pistol.

It makes for a game that can be a real slog at times and also gives one of gaming's best endorphin-rushes when you manage to slay a boss. Returnal does a lot of things very well. The runs are tense. They require focus. You have to buy-in. Collecting guns and obolites, you feel the pressure. You can resonate with Selene fending for her life, because one mistake and she dies, so does your last few hours of investment. It can put you on edge.

This combined with all of the eerie story and aesthetics of this alien world make for a sometimes unnerving experience. The absolutely TREMENDOUS usage of the DualSense's haptics and the PS5's 3D Audio in your headset makes Returnal almost sickeningly immersive. And it pisses you off all the more when your great loot luck is dashed by an entire room full of those god damn tree demons.

The gameplay is flowing and snappy. I find the design choice to make Returnal more of a run 'n' gun than a slow stealthy game pays off well. It feels something like Doom and even Devil May Cry. Dashing about through enemy projectiles, leaping to slash people with your lightsaber and desperately trying to collect obolites before they disappear makes for a really fast paced action game. When you're really in the groove it can feel great. The movements usually feel well related to one another. Faster than you can think but yet you're always trying to think a step ahead. When it gets going it feels really cool.

Returnal has a few drabacks though. The most glaring one is the lack of save states. I don't mean for save scumming, but Returnal runs can take a real long time. You can take 2 hours easy in a really good run. You can take longer if you're trying to salvage a mediocre run into a good one. This is longer than most roguelites which comparably tend to have <30 minute runs. It's hard to pick up the controller in Returnal and try a quick cycle because if it's going well and you have to leave, well there goes your run.

Plenty of roguelites have some form of midrun save or checkpoint system that allows for you to come back to your run later. Especially roguelites with run times as long as Returnal's. I believe at this time Housemarque is allegedly looking into adding such a feature but through my many hours with the game it wasn't there yet. This is particularly egregious when many are reporting issues with crashes while playing Returnal. The game crashed on me once during a run that was awful anyway, but had I been in the middle of a boss fight when it happened I might've shattered my controller. To lack save states in a game with runs that take hours and can be prone to crashing is truly abysmal. Figure out how to shorten run times or just implement a save mechanic.

I thought some of the biomes were a bit underwhelming and I didn't love their layouts. I thought the random gaps and holes in the map during the first biome were more aggravating than interesting. Rarely were they a part of cool puzzles. They were mostly there to piss you off if you happened to dash away from an enemy projectile in the wrong direction. I didn't find them engaging in any form. It also didn't comport well with how cramped biome one felt.

Conversely, biome two is way too open. The desert leading to the mountain is much too large and much too open. Some cool visuals but playing that portion of the biome just isn't interesting. Once you get to ascending the mountain and dealing with the ruin rooms it's a bit more interesting again but ultimately I found the game's opening two biomes to be boring.

Derelict Citadel on the other hand is super cool. And is the most unique of all the biomes. Plenty of cool enemies and just the general aesthetic is interesting. The Abyssal Scar is neat but I found the final boss, Ophion, to be underwhelming. In some ways this was nice. The game was so hard and Abyssal Scar is really an absolute bastard to get to the final boss in decent shape, that it was nice to get to the final boss and be able to win. But I also felt it was as easy if not easier than Nemesis, and though it was cool in the moment it isn't as cool in hindsight.

The Returnal story is not half as cool as it thinks it is. The weird abstract ending and such just doesn't do a lot for me. At all. I guess this is supposed to be some weird metaphor for Selene's relationship with her abusive mother and the death of her daughter in that car crash? Idk. I can't figure it out. The game's way too specific about all of the aliens and xeno stuff on the planet that it just seems weird for it to be all invented in a (dead?) women's brain? I just don't get it. At least it's absolutely gorgeous.

My one big complaint with Returnal gameplay is the guns and gun traits. There's a ton of them. They're random. There's so much RNG. The game gives you very little accessible information about how much actual damage guns do and exactly what their traits do. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure that out. Way more than is necessary. Given the importance of guns and gun traits to progression this made things far more annoying than it ever needed to be.

I have a bit of a soft spot for a good amount of Sony backed games, even if I find plenty to criticize in them. The Astro Bot games are low key some of the best 3D platformers ever made. I had a better time with Ghost of Tsushima than I’ve ever had with an Ubisoft game. The Uncharted games are fun as hell action adventures with incredible mocap work. God of War is gorgeous and has fantastic combat, even if the self-serious story didn’t really do much for me. Horizon Zero Dawn is…also a game I played in its entirety, despite not being particularly wowed by any aspect of it?

These games are all expertly crafted and polished to a sheen few games have the budget to achieve, but I wouldn’t call any of them particularly ambitious. Distinct in identity, sure, but still fairly safe - when so much money is invested in a single one, it only makes sense. That’s what makes Returnal feel like an exciting outlier in this generation’s roster. As a difficult roguelite shooter with an abstract approach to its narrative, it’s the rare game among that above list that feels designed with the idea in mind that it will be not for many of the people that it reaches, and Sony invested higher production value to Housemarque than just about any game in this particular niche has been afforded, either before or since its release.

Before really getting a grip on its mechanics, the thing that captured me about this game is its atmosphere. The Overgrown Ruins, its jungle foliage perpetually covered in heavy rainfall, crawling with aquatic-looking creatures that cascade bullet-hell orbs at you, and soundtracked by Bobby Krlic’s alluringly moody synths, is just an environment that I’m happy to die over and over in just to continue soaking myself in. It honestly might be the game’s biggest achievement; Atropos stands close to Metroid Prime’s Tallon IV as a beautiful and hostile alien world that I just adore the vibes of.

Thankfully, Returnal is also a hell of an actual game, too. The shooting and movement are immaculate, the weapons and equipment are numerous and distinct, the enemy encounters are tense and tough but always doable. It took me a long time to feel particularly competent in my mastery over any of these things, but unlike the occasional experience I’ll have with roguelites, I was having enough fun run to run that I rarely found myself getting discouraged by deaths. And at a certain point, something really did click. My first win was a full run through all three of the later stages of the game, of which I beat the second and third for the first time in the same run, in an immensely satisfying few hours. After that I went back for another ten hours or so to collect everything for the secret ending, simply because I wasn’t quite ready to let go, and found that I had become something approaching actually almost good at the game, which felt kinda incredible. This game just really hit a sweet spot of difficulty for me. It felt genuinely challenging but thoroughly fair, and I could feel how much better I was getting at it the more time I spent with it.

Roguelike/lites are a genre that I’ve been very slow to embrace. There are a handful that I’ve really fallen for (Hades, Into the Breach, Dead Cells), but even with those, the structure of the games wasn’t really what I was loving so much as the moment-to-moment gameplay, characters/story/etc. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve played any game in this style, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I think my brain has fully come to love the run-based approach. I don’t even know if I’d say this is the most brilliantly conceived one-of-these games I’ve played. It’s not the kind of thing where I found myself thinking much about my “build” going into each run, nor did I find my runs being wildly differentiated from each other. I had a handful of go-to consumables and artifacts I’d be on the lookout for every time; it felt like there was one optimal way to spec myself out that worked for me, and there wasn’t a whole lot of encouragement to try other strategies. The fun of RNG mostly came in different weapons with good stats or bonuses that encouraged me to grab interesting guns that I might otherwise not gravitate toward, and in weighing options with parasites to attach, provided the benefit/cost ratio felt worth it. And for me, that was actually enough to get excited with each new run about where it would take me.

Easily the weakest part of the game for me was the story. As I mentioned toward the beginning of this review, I do at least appreciate that they went for a more abstract approach. I like a thing that doesn’t provide all the answers for me, that leaves me a little confused or bewildered or overwhelmed, with a lot of ideas to keep chewing on after the story has played out. Unfortunately though, not only do I not particularly understand what actually happened in the narrative, I don’t think I really care. Selene is well-acted, and some of the initial mystery had me curious to see what her backstory was, but I don’t think I ever got much of a sense of who she actually is, and that made it hard to become invested in doing the work to understand the opaque reveals every time a house sequence or voice log came my way. I never had an actively bad time with it, but none of it lingered with me in any particularly meaningful way.

Thankfully, it was pretty easy enough to treat those story moments as flavor/mood setting for the main attraction, the excellent gameplay loop, which kept me going for a full 40 hours, long after I first hit credits, and any time a game can do that, it’s a sure sign that it’s something pretty special.

Fun gameplay, story and the lead are ehhh, nice visuals and atmosphere. The boss battles are pretty good although sometimes there's too much stuff happening on screen and it can be difficult to dodge some attacks.

I liked the house sections, they're short and spooky. Reminded me a bit of PT.

I was expecting to enjoy it more, the progression is kinda weird imo. Yeah you get some permanent upgrades but they're not that meaningful if the game's rng is against you. The story not being very intesting also doesn't help a lot, it was okay; I expected a bit more.

Overall, it's a nice game and I'm excited to see what Housemarque does next!

pretty tough game, but was able to beat it with just 11 deaths. the final boss is a spectacle though, would highly recommend playing this one all the way through.

Edit...

ok so I didn't actually beat the game that first time, only made it halfway. just beat the actual final boss and I don't think my opinion on the game has changed drastically. still very very tough though, ended up dying 21 times overall.

that being said, if you make it to the halfway point and feel you've had your fill of the game, don't power through the rest, it's mostly more of the same. it might be worth it to fight the next boss of the game though (it's just as good as the mid-boss visually and the buildup to it is phenomenal). I would also recommend checking out the Tower side mode, it streamlined the gameplay a bit and leans way into the arcade-y side of Returnal. the art direction in the Tower might be my favorite in the game, very H.R. Giger (even more so than the base game).

I think the combat feels really nice and fluid and I love the vibes of the setting. As a rogue like though, the structure of it kinda baffles me. There isn't really a whole lot of incentive to redo boss fights since once you beat them, you permanently unlock access to the next area. Really, your only reason to not just mad dash to the exit is finding power ups. I'm also not the biggest fan of the walking sim spooky house moments. The story itself does create an interesting horror scenario out of the rogue like loop though.

I REALLY want to score this game higher because the story and themes are amazing and the gameplay was okay for the most part. But the last biome is unironically one of the worst things I have ever seen in gaming as a whole and it's design and philosophy go directly against what the devs accomplished in earlier portions of the game. I beat the entire game, collected all pieces for the secret ending, saw the last home scene and on my way to the last boss I got grazed by a fucking shockwave attack going though the floor. I didn't even die, but I still took out the disk and decided I'm done with the game. I was tired of asking myself why do I only ever take damage when the visibility is dogshit or something teleports behind me or a shockwave comes from behind a wall, or when I'm in the air with limited movement options. I feel like when you take Retunal under the microscope you start seeing this everywhere. Why are there attacks that penetrate walls and floors below you, which results in truly unavoidable hits? Why design all these awesome risk/reward mechanics when the optimal strategy in EVERY SINGLE RUN is to never engage with them? Why do 75% of the weapons just straight-up suck? Why are there so many artifacts that do next to nothing or are just worse versions of other artifacts in the game? Why did the devs pick one of the most gameplay-heavy genres if their primary objective was to tell a story? If Returnal was not a roguelike and just a story-driven experience I would gladly give it an 8 or a 9. But it is a roguelike and I have to compare it to other roguelikes, and they all fucking sweep it with no effort.

100% Achievements!

A game which excels in atmosphere, graphics, plot and challenge. The music was incredible and the atmosphere was so enjoyable that playing in the levels was a joy. The game has so many weapons with sub traits that make the weapons feel so different. Some weapons can make the game cheesable whilst others make it far more challenging. Whilst I completed the game, I didn't have the heart to go for the secret ending.

My issue was that the difficulty spike in Biome 5 is incredible. In fact half my entire play time (- 20+hrs) was spent on that Biome and honestly grinded my gears. I was exhausted after, however regardless of my lack of skill- I can only hold this in such high esteem. This is most likely the best game on PS5 and with the dual shock controller, a delight to experience. So what are you waiting for?