Time is a strange quantity. We live life forward, understand it backwards and at the same time it is as if things go in circles. The seasons change, so do the holidays. The days take each other. Yesterday’s defunct politicians are re-elected tomorrow, while failed celebrities are resurrected from the mists of oblivion – only to return to them immediately. And in an instant, hidden, forgotten or repressed gaming experiences are recreated, restored or simply re-released on new machines – old wine in new bags, if you will.
There is, after all, something fundamentally circular about computer games. From the circuits of microprocessors that enable their existence, to the abstract loops of player activity – game loops – that we retroactively try to divide them into, many things in the game world – like the wheels on the bus, or the disc in the machine – go round, round, round. There is nothing new in this observation, and several games have tried, with varying degrees of success, to italicize or meditate on the cyclical motif that characterizes so many gaming experiences.
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Still, you’d have to look hard for video games that welcome the cursed circular motion to quite the same extent as the grim and psychologically intricate Returnal. The title is, as you may sense if you strain a nerve cell or two, a contraction of the words eternal and recurring and with such reminders – or threats – of eternal repetitions and unbreakable time loops, the stage is set from the outset for a Sisyphean tragedy of epic proportions.
For the lost astronaut Selene, things literally go around in circles. Every time she dies – and she dies often, for the dangers of the shadowy Atropos are many – she wakes up in the same place, next to the mutilated remains of the starship she arrived in. Whether it’s out of necessity, compulsion or something else entirely, it seems the planet itself – or an evil force that preys on its dark interior – keeping Selene in an inexorable cycle of inexorable death and forced rebirth. The unresolved memories of a past life also begin to creep up, as the captivating circular movement of time takes shape as a downward spiral, hell towards the center of madness.
It’s a bleak, gruesome and irresistibly morbid tale in every way that Returnal has to offer, one that succeeds in capitalizing on the cyclical underpinnings that underpin many games and manages to both quickly and continuously pique curiosity through a mixture of existential unease , unsolved mystery, pitch-black atmosphere and occasional horror. While much of the gameplay is spent in heavy and intense third-person action, as well as careful navigation across maze-like level modules, there are also contrasting moments where Returnal jumps into deep water as pure horror. That the game’s otherwise disparate – even contradictory – elements actually talk together to create the intended mix of excitement and action is proof of balance and moderation on the part of the developers.
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And Returnal only becomes more impressive at the thought of who who is actually behind it. Hopefully without detracting from or oversimplifying the developers’ previous work, it seems fair to say that Finnish developer Housemarque has made a long and commendable career out of building glorified, blistering and visually maximalist paraphrases of classic bang-bang games like Space Invaders and Asteroids. Don’t get me wrong, titles like Super Stardust, Resogun and Nex Machina have their own irrepressible wealth of style, charm and elegance, but you’d think the road from colorful explosion orgies to hellish space spirals would be longer.
But behind the game’s photorealistic graphics and terrifying atmosphere, Returnal hides a gaming experience that is still unmistakably Housemarque DNA. This is not a bloodless or passive story-driven gaming experience, but an addictive action game where both precision and caution are in the driver’s seat, where the screen is regularly drowned in a sea of deadly projectiles, and where a mixture of fast-paced action and frequent deaths provide a high replay value and dopamine pill chorus: “Just one more round.”
In that sense, Returnal is closer to its predecessors than you might think. It’s a game that, at first glance, looks like a nice but average third-person shooter, but which reveals more of its nuances – and diverse inspirations – the further you venture into its procedural underworld. One of the more radical additions is the varied level design. It’s not just Selene who loses both consciousness, memory and acquired possessions with each death: the world itself seems to be slowly losing its mind, and with each blood-dripping session the composition of the rooms changes.
The relationship between persistent loss of player progression and switchable levels has been documented and explored across many 2D roguelikes, such as Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, and The Binding of Isaac. With an added dimension, successful use of procedurally composed paths understandably becomes exponentially more complex – not to mention controversial. Returnal’s shifting floor plan certainly adds a sense of mystery and reinforces the hostile attitude the game’s world generally greets you with, but far and away the success of variable course design comes down to one thing: moderation.
You quickly learn to navigate and recognize the rough modular pieces that are dynamically assembled in the game’s areas – and that’s the point. Procedural lane design doesn’t try to reinvent the deep court or leave the tailored lane ride to chance. But together with a generally high level of difficulty and important unknown factors such as the number of enemies and upgrades the rooms have, the game’s changing mazes help to ensure a predominantly high level of tension, mystery, danger. Despite the developers’ penchant for projectile saves, you’ll rarely be attacked by more than a handful of enemies at a time. But you never know how many or what kind of enemies will come. And that makes all the difference.
As a result, the game’s levels don’t feel like a long gut of randomly assembled map elements, but more like a handful of rotating – but carefully selected – scenarios, akin to the caves a game master assembles for a campaign in a tabletop RPG. At the same time, you are always accompanied by a hugely generous 3D map that visualizes and interprets your surroundings in real time, making it easy to quickly find hidden healing items or upgrades. If anything, I found myself almost a little too often looking down in the right corner, instead of dynamically orienting myself. Some of the dissonance also undeniably comes from the fact that the game’s almost photorealistic surroundings must simultaneously accommodate red laser cones and pulsating upgrade nebulae, whose placement and graphics, in many a better description, seem incredibly computer game-like.
It’s these little frictions, again, that I think will make Returnal seem like a game that yawns too much – an experience where the oil keeps parting the water, no matter how hard developers and players try to whip things together in concert. And that’s fair enough. For some, there will be too much distance between the snaps – the audiobooks and graffiti that carry most of the game’s narrative burden – for the game’s story to grip them like that. For others, the frequency of enemies and action will be too low to scratch in all the right places. To third parties, the balance between semi-permanent progression and procedural gameplay elements will seem like a half-hearted attempt to incorporate the key lessons of an extraordinarily rich school of design.
But I have no doubt that Returnal can do something – and that something is very special. It is in the mix of these diverse, slightly outdated game elements that the game’s identity comes into focus for me. It’s a unique blend of philosophical space suspense, nerve-wracking action and procedural game elements that not only testify to the developers’ skills as skilled game builders, but also their future status as great storytellers – standard bearers in Sony’s fleet of flagship titles.
So of course I’m glad the game has now come to PC, although I find it hard to believe we’re now in the third year of the PlayStation 5. With a PC release naturally comes a host of technical upgrades and bragging rights, though I have enjoyed some of them. Ultra-high resolution is unfortunately out of the realm of possibility for me, and if I can say that Sony’s current console has already aged, I can doubly say that my computers have end older. In any case, I have experienced serious technical problems on my desktop computer – to such an extent, in fact, that a review seemed impossible for a long time. Not only was performance shaky, but there was a more fundamental problem where the game’s many cutscenes never loaded properly and the game constantly crashed as a result. What I can appreciate, however, is how the game’s use of haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects can also be experienced on the computer – if you’re the lucky owner of a DualSense 5, that is. If you are not in possession of such a technological marvel, I can assure you that Returnal plays quite well with the mouse and keyboard combination instead. Reaction speed is one thing, but where the best way to avoid threats is ultimately to eliminate them, precision is more precious than any weapon upgrade. After being stuck with a boss for a few hours, I switched from controller to mouse and the difference was felt immediately.
And this thing about being stuck is significant enough, because Returnal certainly does not twiddle its thumbs. It’s not like it’s drowning you in a maelstrom of strong enemies or constantly barraging you with sweeping gotcha jabs. You can only die quickly, and when you do, it hurts. Because then you’re back to square one, without sexy extras or custom weapons. Sure, you’re constantly unlocking upgrades of a more permanent nature, but they’re spaced out and many of them are tied up with the main story. This is probably where the game runs the biggest risk of losing the player. A generous map compass always tells you where you have to move to get further in the game, but the game is correspondingly silent when you tell what you can do to facilitate the journey there. It is not a question of making the game easier, but of giving the player more or better options to negotiate about the difficulty dynamic.
One such negotiation option is surely the option to team up with a Selena from an alternate universe – that is, with another player, via the internet. Unfortunately, despite patient searching, I haven’t been able to find a playmate, but I don’t know if I’m tempted either. There’s something slow, dangerous, and methodical about Returnal that I feel in the solitude of the game, and that I don’t necessarily want to share, but who knows? Maybe I’ll give it a shot now that the game has officially released. Or maybe the increasing difficulty will end up leaving me with no choice.
Returnal isn’t for everyone, and if the game’s distinctive blend of psychological horror, heavy atmosphere, and unnerving die-and-start gameplay doesn’t hook you in the first few hours, the game won’t do much during the subsequent rounds of crying and the gnashing of teeth to convince you either. For my part, I can feel the game taking root in me – like Selene, I’ve been slowly caught up in Atropi’s spiraling web of torment, death and resurrection. Not since the crew of the Nostromo landed on LV-426, and indirectly initiated the birth of the 8th passenger into the collective unconscious, has a turbulent and darkened planet made such an impression on me. Selene’s sublime journey down the alien hostility of Atropos brings to mind both cinematic and ludic space thrills – from Alien to Metroid, from Ripley to Ripley – and if this is the future of Housemarque’s work, well, I welcome it.