Returnal disappointed me.

My first run was fantastic. Running through the different environments, fighting enemies, dodging the bullet hell, and overall just running around was a lot of fun. I figured "this is it, finally, a great roguelite".

I heard stories of this game being incredibly difficult, however I soon learnt that is not the case. Maybe on console this game is harder, or for people who are not used to playing this type of game, but I ended up completing my first ever run.
I then completed the second, the third, and fourth, and I got confused. Why isn't there new content? What am I missing?
I quickly found out that I had completed more or less everything in the game except for the secret ending. I started moving towards the secret ending too, but in the end I got burnt out.

While the moving, shooting, and core gameplay is really fun, there is little to no challenge or gameplay variation. The zones feel samey, and you've seen everything the game really has to offer after less than 6 hours. Other than a couple of cutscenes, the game really had nothing more to offer. I kept playing hoping there would be more, but no.

What a shame. I think the developers thought the game was a lot harder than it actually is. And maybe it could have been, but you more or less gain full health back in-between every single encounter. You can't get slowly trickled down like in most roguelites.
There is also almost nothing to unlock. Honestly this game could have been special, the core gameplay is there. Too bad it goes nowhere. It's like a writing prompt you wish someone would turn into a proper novel, but it's still just a 1 sentence writing prompt, this time for 60 bucks.

If Rusty has a million fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has five fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has 1 fan, that one is me
If Rusty has no fans, I am no longer alive
If the world is against Rusty, I am against the entire world 🗣️🔥

my interest in any truly structured long-form exercise here is more or less sapped so we'll hurriedly push past the brush and thistle to attempt to address the main points after one and a half playthroughs on hardcore. nota bene - i would have understandably played more if not for my analog stick succumbing to drift, and i would have also liked to squeeze in both a playthrough on standard as well as a professional playthrough in the interests of some nebulous due diligence i inexplicably feel i owe, but honestly the changes to professional seem mostly dull & the idea of learning the perfect parry timing in the game's second half on a ps4 with wobbly frame rate has less and less appeal the more i zero in on the idea. the ps4 version also has a significant problem with whatever technique they decided to use to render scope magnification, with a net result of halving the frame rate which is simply unacceptable for the kind of game this is - you're not zooming over swathes of land in search of a singular lonely target, you're scoping to try and land a bullseye that's five meters away! needless to say this made the regenerator sections tedious as all hell.

alterations to the core mechanical skeleton in RE4R are 'well-considered' but i hesitate to describe them as necessarily meaningful since an uncharitable interpretation would view this as a particularly hasty process of reverse engineering and applying tried-and-true bandaids to stem the hemorrhaging. free movement necessitates expanded enemy aggression, which inadvertently dilutes enemy behaviour, which means the designers had to inject elements of inconsistency to prevent easily optimized patterns of play, which calls for emergency defensive measures to keep encounters fair and level. this shifts the scope of its mechanics from thoughtful aggression to somewhat reactionary kiting. stack up enough of this over the course of a 12-20 hour playthrough and encounters start to blend together, something which becomes a rather serious issue once you get to this game’s fatigued rendition of the island. a shift in combat methodology towards reactionary gameplay wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself since you could argue it’s capturing some of re4’s more experiential qualities, but 1.) lol and 2.) brazenly inviting so many explicit grounds for comparison only serves to crystallize the qualities that made the original so special.

while many practical adages and tenets can be ascribed to and extracted from the original, it's difficult to say it doesn't subscribe to this overriding idea that 'less is more'. stop to consider the implications of this for one second and you might even recognize that the original doesn't have an overwhelming bestiary; there’s only a sparse handful of enemy types in spite of the notoriety of so many of its encounters. it’s commendable that a game built on minute alterations of one enemy unit can be described as constantly escalating and endlessly varied. one ganado on its own is never a threat, easily incapacitated with the swift slash of a knife, but as an enemy unit they are allowed to take on greater meaning through level design, decisions centered around resource management, and their method of deployment. in this sense, the original game has something of a beat ‘em up philosophy in its encounter design. there’s a comforting sense of rigidity set in place by its core mechanics which is then expounded on by the implementation of RNG which can alter the output of actions in ways both dramatic and subtle. a plagas eruption might force you on the retreat; a critical headshot might have robbed you of the roundhouse kick you were looking for; the enemy might have launched from your kick in a way that opens you up to risk if you tried to strike them on the ground. RE4R’s RNG, meanwhile, is most apparent in the way it approaches enemy staggers, and while it’s not something i’ll address too much since you’ve read about it everywhere else, it’s clearly a thorny inclusion which appears to be influenced by, at a minimum, the focus of your aiming reticule, the damage value of your weapon, the enemy’s health pool, and dynamic difficulty considerations which are holdovers from the previous two remakes in this new chronology. we might never know exactly how it’s calculated, but its effect on the game at a macro and micro level is easily observable and will make or break the game for some.

the point is no challenge in the original comes across as repetitious the way it so often does in RE4R and what’s frustrating is that there are moments which offer compelling grounds for expansion but which are rarely capitalized on. red cultists in the original are simply hardier and more physically resistant enemies, which is a misfire, but the remake reinterprets these enemies as summoners who can outright conjure plagas eruptions. it’s a frankly brilliant idea, so it’s shocking that it’s only leaned into a handful of times, two of which are seemingly explicitly designed to be skipped for speedrunning purposes. it’s the kind of change that could really serve to flesh out this game’s identity much further, and it feels wasteful to not consider the ways in which this type of enemy can add a layer of decision-making to its combat design.

there’s no discussion of RE4R without a discussion of the knife (which i mostly think is appropriately satisfying if entirely boring), but rather than exhaustively assess RE4R’s knife or semantically compare knife usage between games, let’s change gears for a second here and just consider the knife in the original. the knife can deflect projectiles, interrupt enemy advances, set up contextual attacks, strike grounded enemies, crumple them – anything that a handgun can do, a knife can do at close range and without wasting ammunition. it’s the ol’ reliable, a fundamentally ‘safe’ option with an appropriately attached high degree of risk. given its newfound metered dependency in the remake, your safe option isn’t the knife anymore – it’s actually the bolt thrower. with its negation of aiming reticule focus requirements, ranged approach which shields you from close-quarters damage, silent nature (a veritable rarity in this title), semi-consistent staggers at the cost of slow firing speed and loading speed, and nigh endlessly retrievable ammo, the bolt thrower is, if anything, a safer option than the knife ever was in the original. deploy it carefully and meticulously, and the most risk you’ll ever be at is if you’re intentionally firing bolts into the ether; they’ve even programmed it in such a way that you’ll often be able to retrieve it from difficult to reach places should you miss.

in addition, you might consider the game’s bolt thrower to be evidence of RE4R’s interrogation and consideration of the lineage of titles which the original inspired – and i do sincerely hope it’s a cheeky homage to the agony crossbow – but it’s also a lesson in poor adaptation. a signature weapon from the evil within 1 & 2, the lynchpin the agony crossbow rests on in the original game is a crafting system dedicated entirely to its output, giving its litany of options distinct value and decision-making potential while reserving its use for player discretion. the second game dilutes this by more broadly allowing you to craft other types of ammunition in addition to bolts, which is the trap upon which RE4R is similarly founded with its crafting system. the system in and of itself is already mostly a needless addition without much interesting balancing relevance, but there's a smaller problem specifically in relation to the bolt thrower - on replays with a more comprehensive view towards where and when your knife could break in relation to its usage and the positioning of merchants, it’s all but certain you’ll be reserving kitchen and boot knifes almost exclusively for the crafting of bolts. it’s a question which at every turn mostly answers itself. the mines which attach to the bolts are interesting since they can be positioned in fun ways with foreknowledge and they also explicitly signal you’ll lose a bolt, but for the most part it’s a safe resource you can be sure you’ll never lose sight of, which is notable if only because it seems to be the opposite of what this game intends to go for. with an eye for long-term planning in relation to bolt usage and knife usage, it’s almost unbelievable how sections of the game i had really struggled with on my first playthrough of hardcore (largely spent surviving minute to minute with shells and rifle ammunition being luxuries) became almost trivial on a second go of it. despite reaching a high level of proficiency in the original, it’s telling that i still never approach things the same conservative way that i often would in RE4R.

in some ways, metered knife dependency the way RE4R approaches it might be the wrong question to be asking. after all there’s nothing stopping players from running away from engagements to seek repairs most of the time if they were so inclined, and there’s precious few chokepoints that make errant knife usage legitimately hazardous. there’s another version of RE4 out there that’s a bit different – it’s called dmc1 – and what’s notable about it is that it remains one of the strongest instances of meter dependency you could reasonably conceptualize in a game. devil trigger is an important resource that you need to tap into – you can build it only by engaging with the combat system, and it allows for a lot of freedom in battles while being tightly designed to prevent abuse, making resource management an ever-present consideration. it was also seemingly designed with a view for a long-term playthrough, perhaps with the intention of allowing players to turn to macro strategy. it’s tempting to ascribe the same quality to RE4R as well, but with every workaround that’s currently in place – whether it’s foreknowledge of merchants, the ability to return to them quickly in certain cases, or kitchen knives/boot knives which will conspicuously be more present in enemy drops thanks to extremely gracious dynamic difficulty if your knife is close to breaking – it seems more clear that it’s intended to act as a measure to get people panicking as a result of the jams they’d enter in their first playthrough while introducing a very slight layer of decision-making. it’s questionable how true this is – after all, every prompt where you could use a knife is very explicitly signaled, which is a distinct contrast from the purpose of something like fuel in REmake or matches in the evil within 1 – but i suppose it’d get people into the groove nonetheless. but if only there was some way to introduce meter dependency to discourage certain actions and reinforce careful thought in a way that was truly interlinked with the game’s mechanics without handing out this many get-out-of-jail-free cards…

ahem, comparisons to resident evil 6 have run amok since the release of the demo and to be sure, this is the only resident evil game since to squarely address action game mechanics, but ironically (and perhaps controversially) most of the comparisons reflect on RE4R poorly. despite its disorganized presentation and severely unsystematic approach, resident evil 6 is still one of the last capcom action games to anchor itself on player agency, and it has an enemy suite which is designed to match this. they're legible in their behaviour and they're consistent in how you can affect them. the game's most compelling qualities might be relegated to side content in its fantastic mercenaries mode versus the vulgar bombast presented in its campaign, but even those mercenaries scenarios are fledgling score attack exercises with legitimate thought given to the waves of enemies converging on your location. mess around a bit and you’ll find a game teeming with an onslaught of strong enemy types which is at no point at risk of illegibility, in which the effect your actions can have on enemies is always consistent, in which enemies still adhere to more classical ideas of encounter design, and in which the resource management imposed by stamina (versus the knife) yields just as many meaningful decisions on a moment to moment basis with similar consequences for misuse without throttling the strongest aspects of the game or precluding the player from engaging on those terms. the game is, almost to a fault, an intentionally spearheaded evolution of principles which are enshrined by both the original re4 and re5 – it’s fundamentally the same type of game. RE4R, meanwhile, belongs to a different caste of games in this regard by eschewing clarity and consistency for a middle ground which neither matches the deliberate rhythms of the original nor the dizzying highs of re6’s combat systems.

if i had to pick a favourite element of RE4R, it would be everything to do with luis, but if i have to choose something else i’d have to pick something which i haven’t seen much discussion of yet – the treasure economy. or at least it would be in theory, because regrettably and frustratingly, it’s still emblematic of a lot of the game’s issues. in the original game, treasure becomes an afterthought on subsequent playthroughs – you know where it is and you attempt to maximize the benefits you’ll reap by virtue of your patience, or you don’t bother and you forego the PTAs. seeing a fitting grounds for expansion, RE4R opts to introduce more layers to treasures – now, the way gems are laid in treasures can be optimized to provide higher payouts depending on the way you’ve combined gems, but it could take even longer to put together. this, combined with a lower turnout on PTAs in hardcore, makes for a tantalizing risk/reward economy – you’re always just on the verge of upgrades, and the treasures are massive boons, but if you’re patient you might be able to reach an even greater payday. the issue is that for all the touches of inconsistency present in the game, treasure is once again consistent for some reason. once you know where things are located on playthrough 1, you’ll know where they’re located on playthrough 2 – why include the gem payout table at all if people are going to go through the same rhythms again so they can optimize their payouts? if they had kept a system in which the treasures were consistent, but the gems were randomized across playthroughs, this would have been a wonderful system which i think would have served as an intelligent expansion of the original’s tenets because it would have kept players constantly thinking. further harming this is the fact that treasures are easier to find than ever, and the spinel trading system is subject to a lot of the same considerations which mostly leave something to be desired in spite of how strong the working concept is.

RE4R is not a bad game, but it’s a frustratingly risk averse one – we’re talking about a game whose hallmarks include attache case tetris and they have decided to include an auto-organizer at the click of a button. its best qualities are rehashes of either the game it’s based on or of contemporary third person-shooters that still arguably retain more to unpack and think about (the evil within 2, dead space 2, debatably the last of us). it’s a shock to the system to play a modern TPS that isn’t meandering in pace or languidly focused on some misguided appropriation of cinematic expression to its detriment, but even RE4R’s slower-paced moments – total anathema to the game it’s in conversation with – still present SOMETHING different that sticks out in my memory, some kind of hook to latch onto. there’s a late game section which uncharacteristically wrests control from your grasp and forces you to march forward which, for a few moments, taps into a new idea which the game could have called its own if it had the gumption. instead it opted to pay homage to the original's action game legacy - it's not the wrong decision per se, but without that substantive design backing it up, i'm not certain it was the right one.

- admittedly great soundtrack though, not exactly an aesthetic quality of the original that shone.
- love the new merchant
- narratively it's tonally confused but there are a few moments that make me think they're a little in on the joke. i'd submit it's not quite as self-serious as you'd expect from one of these remakes but that doesn't mean it has as much fun with the source material as you'd like. the villains are charisma voids here since they don't show up to talk their shit ever and it's telling that they dumped like half of salazar's most iconic lines into his boss fight since he had no other opportunity to reference them. come on guys, do something new, even re3make abandoned the most iconic line from the original game because it was the right thing to do.
- environments look great from time to time, enemies...much less so. the artist who likes object heads and sharp teeth got their hands on re4, now just you wait and see what he does with re5
- oh yeah they're remaking re5, no question about it. funniest decision of all time. im willing to betray all my principles on remakes to see that. at this point im just along for the ride, they haven't put out a resident evil game i've really liked in a long while.
- there's an interesting wrinkle in this game's narrative - it's this newly introduced thread about the capacity people have for change, which i think is a somewhat fitting idea given the parasite motif, but all the strongest changes are basically just reserved for luis and ashley and no one else gets anything neat. not sure where they were going with this ultimately.
- what's up with the minecart section in this. even re6 has a traditional minecart section and that game also has free movement so don't bother trying to say they needed to script it here
- the thing i was really looking for here was some REmake level thread which justified its existence - something that showed they gave a lot of thought to the original game's mechanics and intended to evolve it while providing a fundamentally different experience. REmake is very much a Side B to the original RE1's Side A - you won't get value from it without understanding the original title it's in conversation with. regrettably, this was not the case and RE4R's remixes of the original game's content are much more pedestrian and conventional.
- good on them for making krauser a boss fight this time and i enjoy the krauser encounters in the original
- i'm really underselling how much i enjoyed luis in this game
- separate ways dlc...zzz...