Time is an odd quantity. We live it forward, we understand it backwards, and at the same time it’s like things are going in circles. The seasons change and so do the holidays. Day after day. Politicians who failed yesterday are re-elected tomorrow, and celebrities who fail are resurrected from the mists of oblivion — only to return to them immediately. In the blink of an eye, hidden, forgotten or squeezed gaming experiences are recreated, restored or simply republished on new machines – old wine in a new bag, if you will.
After all, computer games have some basic loops. From the microprocessor circuits that enable them to exist, to the abstract loop of player activity – the game loop – we retroactively try to divide them into many things in the game world – such as the wheels on a bus, or the CD – round and round and round and round. This observation is nothing new, and several games have attempted italics or meditation, with varying success, to characterize so much of the gaming experience.
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Still, you’ll have to work hard to find video games that welcome the cursed circular motion to the same degree as the bleak and psychologically intricate Returnal.The title is, if you tense a nerve cell or two, you might feel, eternity andreturncontraction of the two words, and eternityRepeat and prisonThe reminder or threat of an unbreakable loop of time sets the stage for the epic Sisyphus tragedy from the very beginning.
For missing astronaut Selene, things are actually going in circles. Every time she dies—and she dies often, because the dangers aboard the murky Atropos are many—she wakes up in the same place, next to the wreckage of the spaceship she arrived at. Whether out of necessity, compulsion, or otherwise, the planet itself—or some sinister force obsessed with its dark interior—seems to keep Selene locked in a relentless cycle of death and forced rebirth. Unresolved memories from the past also start to creep in, as the mesmerizing circular motion of time forms a downward spiral, hellishly toward the center of madness.
It’s a grim, terrifying, irresistibly morbid tale in every sense of the word Returnal delivers, successfully tapping into the cyclical underpinnings that underpin so many games, and managing to navigate through existential turmoil, unsolved mysteries, pitch-black A mixture of atmospheric atmosphere and sporadic horror to pique curiosity quickly and consistently. While much of the game’s time is spent in heavy and intense third-person action and carefully navigating through the maze-like level mods, there are some contrasting moments where Returnal plunges into deep water in sheer horror. It’s a testament to the developer’s balance and moderation that the game’s otherwise disparate and even conflicting elements actually come together to create the intended mix of thrills and action.
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And Returnal will only think of who is really behind ithands and become even more impressive. Hoping not to take away or oversimplify the developer’s previous work, it seems fair to say that Finnish developer Housemarque has achieved this by building beautified, bubbling, and visually maximizing interpretations of classic blaster games like Space Invaders and Asteroids. A long and laudable career. Don’t get me wrong, games like Super Stardust, Resogun, and Nex Machina have their own irrepressible wealth of style, charm, and elegance, but you’d think the road from a colorful blast orgy to a hellish space spiral would be much longer .
But behind the game’s realistic graphics and terrifying atmosphere, Returnal hides a gaming experience that still unmistakably has Housemarque DNA. This is not a bloodless or passive story-driven gaming experience, but an addictive action game where precision and caution are in the driver’s seat, the screen is constantly drowning in a sea of deadly projectiles, fast-paced action and frequent The mix of death yields high replay value and the restraint of a dopamine pill: “One more round.”
In that sense, Returnal is closer to its predecessor than you might think. At first glance, the game looks like a decent but generic third-person shooter, but it reveals more nuance and diverse inspirations as you venture deeper into the stylized underground world. One of the more radical additions is the varied level designs. It’s not just Selene who loses consciousness, memories, and acquired possessions with each death: the world itself seems to be slowly losing its mind, changing the composition of the room with each gory session.
The relationship between the continuous loss of player progress and switchable levels has been documented and explored in many 2D roguelikes, such as Spelunky, The Rogue’s Legacy, and The Binding of Isaac. As the dimensionality increases, successfully using program composition paths becomes exponentially more complex – not to mention controversial. Returnal’s ever-changing floor plan certainly adds a sense of mystery and reinforces the hostile attitude the game world usually greets you with, but the success of the variable lane design comes down to one thing: moderation.
You quickly learn to navigate and recognize the rough mod parts that are dynamically pieced together throughout the game area – and that’s the point. Craftsmanship Lane Design doesn’t try to reinvent the deep dish or leave the tailored driveway journey to chance. But aside from the generally high difficulty level and important unknowns like the number of enemies and room upgrades, the game’s ever-changing mazes help ensure a high level of tension, mystery, and danger. As much as the developers love projectile saves, you’ll rarely be hit by more than a few enemies at a time. But you never know how many or what kind of enemies are coming. This makes all the difference.
As a result, the game’s levels feel less like long guts of randomly assembled map elements and more like swirling but carefully chosen scenarios, similar to the caves game masters put together for campaigns in tabletop RPGs. Meanwhile, you’re always accompanied by a very generous 3D map that instantly visualizes and interprets your surroundings, making it easy to quickly find hidden healing items or upgrades. If anything, I find myself almost constantly looking into the right corner instead of dynamically orienting myself. Admittedly, some dissonance also comes from the fact that the game’s almost realistic environments have to accommodate both red laser cones and pulsing upgrade fog, whose placement and visual effects, in many better descriptions, look very much like computer games .
Again, it’s these little frictions that I think make Returns feel like a yawning game to some — an experience where the oil keeps parting the waters, no matter how hard developers and players try to keep things in place. together. That’s fair. For some, the snapshots are too far apart–the audiobooks and wall inscriptions carry much of the game’s narrative burden–for the game’s story to capture them as such. For others, the frequency of enemies and actions is too low to scratch in all the right places. For third parties, the balance between semi-permanent progression and stylized game elements seems like a half-hearted attempt to fit into the key lessons of a very rich design school.
However, I have no doubt that Returnal can do something – and something very special. It’s in the mix of these diverse, somewhat unplanned game elements that the game’s identity comes into focus for me. Its unique blend of philosophical spatial stimulation, nerve-wracking action, and stylized gameplay elements proves not only the developers as skilled game builders, but also their future status as great storytellers – Sony’s flagship game standard bearer.
So of course, I’m glad the game is now coming to PC, though I find it hard to believe we’re now in the third year of the PlayStation 5. With PC releases, there are naturally some tech upgrades and bragging rights, though I rarely like them.Unfortunately ultra high res is beyond the realms of possibility for me and if I can say that Sony’s current console is aging then I can double say minecomputers have become moreold. In any case, I had serious technical problems on my desktop computer – in fact, to the point where it seemed to be impossible to review for a long time. Not only was the performance choppy, but there was a more fundamental issue where a large number of the game’s cutscenes never loaded properly, causing the game to keep crashing. On the other hand, I can understand that the game’s use of haptic feedback and motion-triggered effects can also be experienced on PC–if you’re the lucky DualSense 5 owner, that is. If you don’t have such a technological marvel, I can assure you that Returnal plays a fantastic game with the mouse and keyboard combo. Reaction speed is one thing, but ultimately the best way to avoid a threat is to eliminate it, and precision is more precious than any weapon upgrade. After hours of being stuck with the boss, I switched from the controller to the mouse and felt the difference immediately.
The thing about being stuck is important enough because Returnal certainly isn’t wagging its thumb. It’s not like it’s drowning you in a vortex of powerful enemies, or constantly stabbing you with sweeping traps. You can die quickly, and when you do, it hurts. Because then you’re back to square one, no sexy extras or tweaked weapons. Sure, you keep unlocking upgrades of a more permanent nature, but there’s a long way to go between them, many of which tie into the main storyline. This is probably where the game is at its greatest risk of losing players.A generous map compass always tells you where you have to movewhereto go further in the game, but when I tell youyou canThe game is correspondingly silent when something is done to facilitate the journey there.It’s not a question of the game being easier, but giving the player more or better options to playresolve dynamicallyThis difficulty.
One such bargaining opportunity is sure to be the possibility of teaming up with Selena from another universe–that is, with another player via the internet. Despite patiently searching, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a playmate, but I don’t know if I was tempted. There’s something slow and dangerous and methodical about Return that I feel in my solitude with the game that I don’t necessarily want to share, but who knows? Maybe I’ll give it a go now that the game is officially out. Or, maybe the ever-increasing difficulty ends up leaving me with no choice.
Returnal isn’t for everyone, and if the game’s unique combination of psychological horror, heavy atmosphere, and nerve-wracking gameplay of dying and restarting doesn’t entice you in the first few hours, the game will weep and bleed in subsequent rounds. Gritting its teeth doesn’t do much to convince you, either. For my part, I could feel the game taking root in me—like Selene, I was slowly drawn into Atropy’s spiraling web of torture, death, and resurrection. Not since the Nostromo crew landed on LV-426 and indirectly initiated the birth of an 8th passenger into the collective unconscious has a planet of turmoil and darkness struck me as such. Selene’s sublime journey through the alien hostility of Atropos conjures up films and absurd space thrillers — from Alien to Metroid, from Ripley to Ripley — if this was Hausmark’s work The future, well, I welcome it.
