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.