I love this game so much. I love this game so much I dream about it. I love how every mechanical decision is built on some marketing quirk for the Playstation 5 hardware. I love that it is purely a fetish object. I love the way its narrative - which would be stupid, shallow, and unaffecting in any other medium - flows into a kind of demonic poetry, where its symbology slips into vestiges of Gamerdom (audio logs, the amalgamation of proc gen elements within its metroidvania structure, walking sim interludes). I love its bombastic cruelty. I love its bifurcated, cartoonishly sinister rhyming. I love that it is not the self versus the self or the self versus the world but the self versus hell. I love the coy way its upgrades only become useful once you have gone long enough without them. I love its pacing, which asks you to learn an area intimately and then flee through it to have enough psychological stamina for repeated efforts, an intentional barrier where the obstacle is just your willingness to give yourself over to what the game is teaching you, to forget you have ever played anything else, "immersion" as total mental submission. I love its bosses. I love Blue Oyster Cult. I love that beneath the skeleton is an astronaut. I love that Returnal is not enough, even for itself. I love that I loathe that this is the platonic ideal of the video games we have built for ourselves. Our best is ancient as the titans of an arcade's high score, Y.O.U. Most of all, I love that Returnal exists as a cacophony of echoes with no aural vanishing point; Plug your ears and the tone only gets deeper and louder.