In a gaming landscape dominated and saturated with time-loop stories and dime-a-dozen rogue-lite titles,
Returnal actually manages to deliver something truly unique and worthwhile.
For every great rogue-lite and rogue-like game on the market (and I’ll be generous in saying that there’s quite an assortment), there too is a cavalcade of derivative, complacent, and boring fodder; games that do nothing but attempt to copy the likes of other great rogue-lites, and by extension, other great time loop games. It’s sad to say, since the rogue-lite/rogue-like genres are so interesting and intriguing in the first place, BUT, just like all great things that reach a certain level of popularity, market saturation eventually sweeps in to diminish upon that said thing’s greatness.
With all that said, it makes me happy to say that Housemarque have managed to find a way to make yet another rogue-lite game feel not only fun and enjoyable, but also enthralling and fresh.
Holistically, as a complete package,
Returnal isn’t resting on its laurels as a rogue-lite, but rather, like a genre contemporary game like Supergiant’s
Hades, it builds upon that rogue-lite foundation in clever and inventive ways.
From the start,
Returnal is a game brimming with vision, and it very much seems confident in that vision. As soon as you’ve taken control of the main protagonist, Selene, it’s hard not to become engrossed in
Returnal’s rich atmosphere and inspired world design. The alien planet that you find yourself stranded upon is one brimming in mystery and intrigue, and this sense of omnipresent mystery is part of the reason you become so captivated in this game’s world, and in finding out what lurks around the next corner. For as absolutely bonkers good as the gameplay is in
Returnal (and I’ll be sure to return to that thought), it also cannot be understated how alluring the game’s story is.
It’s a surreal trip; a story that steadily unravels piece by piece the more you discover about your whereabouts and about yourself. For many players, the surreal narrative style will be a turn-off, but for others, including myself, it’s a welcome surprise (and take it from me, the less you know going into this game story-wise the better your experience will be). But simply having a surreal and (somewhat) non-linear story isn’t simply justification for sheer praise straight out of the gate, no, for a game, or any form of entertainment or art to employ a storytelling style such as this one, it has to feel earned, and it has to complement the rest of the experience. In
Returnal’s case, it exceeds on this and then some. It’s one of those games where you realize just minutes into starting it up that you probably won’t get the sort of all-conclusive answers that tie everything up neatly, and that’s part of where the thrill and satisfaction stem from story-wise.
Returnal’s story succeeds because it doesn’t hand you the answers in a straightforward manner, rather it’s up to you to come to your own interpretations (to a certain extent) and if that’s something that excites you, then this game may just be for you. It’s a game that feeds off of the thrill of the chase, the allure of the mystery itself, not so much the answers at the end of the tunnel, and it’s every bit better for it.
But don’t get it twisted, while the story may be an interesting aspect of this game,
Returnal also isn’t going to be remembered for a deep or groundbreaking story (which is non-existent in the first place), rather, it’s going to be remembered and lovingly discussed for its gameplay. And boy does this game play.
At its core,
Returnal is a third-person action bullet-hell rogue-lite, but it’s really so much more than all those $10 buzz words. Developer Housemarque have expertly taken the best elements from their brilliant past works
Resogun and
Nex Machina, and took everything they learned from developing those games and have applied it to this new title. In many ways, the bullet-hell shooting mechanics in
Returnal feel eerily reminiscent of those older games, but these mechanics also add so much more. Whereas their previous game,
Nex Machina, was a twin-stick shooter with bullet-hell elements,
Returnal instead takes upon those mechanics and transforms them into a fluid and blazing fast third-person shooter experience.
Above all, the movement and gunplay in
Returnal is high stakes, frenetic, and adrenaline I inducing to an absurd degree. Most likely you’ll at first feel overwhelmed by the sheer ridiculous amount of things happening on screen all at once, especially if you’re new to these style of shooters. But after putting in the time to grind and learning the mechanics and enemy attack patterns, you’ll find yourself blowing past threats that once sent you back to boot at your trusty ship. And speaking of the enemies in this game, there are so many, and they are all so distinctly and deliberately designed to kill you in uniquely brutal ways, each one delivering a different manner of suffering for the player.
However, the beauty in this game’s combat comes from the dichotomy of satisfaction v suffering, in failure v achievement, and how the lines often blur between both throughout your play time. If you’ve heard anything about
Returnal at this point, then you surely have heard about the game’s difficulty. Death in
Returnal is not a matter of if, but simply a matter of a slender window of ‘when,’ and like other legendary games that have a reputation for their difficulty being at the core of their gameplay experience (namely Souls-like games),
Returnal understands that, while dying often is most certainly a given, it doesn’t have to mean failure.
Like games like
Dark Souls, death in
Returnal is much more than just that. It’s a learning experience, and in many of the same ways that Souls-like games have a way of paralleling learning from in-game failures as lessons to learning from real life failures as lessons, so does
Returnal accomplish the same feat. The game seems to silently understand the player’s position and the enormous burden that Selene has been appointed with. It’s as if the developers are silently communicating to the player that they understand, and that while the task at hand may seem downright impossible at times, anything is possible once you set your mind to it.
But this feeling of feeling like your facing impossible odds at all times is one that never subsides in
Returnal; in a way it’s like the mission statement of the game. There’s this grim, crushing sense of nihilistic foreboding that hangs over every next major encounter in
Returnal, and it’s as if it’s almost teasing you with the notion of success at every turn. But failure isn’t everything in
Returnal.
You apply yourself and learn the many intricacies to this game’s mechanics and to its even more complex world mechanics and you will succeed. You’ll find yourself taking on smorgasbords of fiendishly nightmarish foes without breaking a sweat; you’ll be evading hundreds of glowing death orbs hurtling towards you all at once and taking the time to stop in awe to be mesmerized by the absolute next-level particle effects in all those glowing death orbs. Moreover, you’ll find yourself taking down downright outrageous bosses, bosses that at one point in time, were the bane of Selene’s existence.
And it’s this other lesson that
Returnal instills in the player: as much as your failures matter, your victories matter even more. Arguably heavily difficult games like
Returnal make us appreciate our victories more so than in any number or less-difficult games because, once we do succeed, we feel like we’ve done so much to earn it, so it matters more. And with the hellish barrage of a past year and a half we’ve all had, I can’t help but feel like
Returnal (and the rare handful of games like it) is doing something truly unique in that it serves as a parallel for how we fail, learn, and eventually overcome in the real world just as we do in this equally engrossing and frustrating video game.
It’s a video game that reminded me of the film
Prometheus in the first ten minutes and for some reason that was wasn’t a bad thing, and for that alone, I think it deserves all the praise and accolades it’s getting. Do yourself a favor and play it for yourself. I don’t know man, I’m never good at wrapping these things up.
P.S.: Without spoiling anything I just wanted to briefly say that some of the boss fights in this game are in contention for being among the greatest I’ve ever fought. They’re so, so good.