Returnal Review
“The End is Never the End…” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
Returnal was first unveiled in June of 2020. The trailer managed to succinctly outline the game’s premise while remaining vague enough to maintain a level of intrigue. The idea was easy to get behind. Selene crash lands on Atropos, a constantly changing planet. And its Housemarque making a game with a more Triple A scope while maintaining the spirit of high octane action that Housmarque’s other games had. So let’s see what one of the first truly next gen games on the PS5 has to offer.
Image Credit: HouseMarque
Returnal is a high octane, rouglike, 3rd person shooter. The action is as fast and frantic as one would expect from a Housemarque game. The systems at play in this game all flow together nicely. The variety of weapons, buffs, equipment and other items all play nicely together when fighting through the biomes of Atropos and its vicious wildlife.
Most of the weapons in this game feel great to use. There are ten weapons spread across the six biomes with a few unlocking each time you get to a new area. The pistol is what you always start off with and can be potentially pretty viable if you find a good one late in the run. There’s also the typical kind of weapons you would expect like an assault rifle and shotgun equivalents. As well as some more off color kind of weapons like a gun that launches a cloud of poison and does damage over time. Or the Pylon driver which shoots pikes into or around enemies and shocks them. I was partial to the Assault rifle and shot gun type weapons for a lot of my play time but I really started to take a shine to the Hollow Seeker towards the end.
Once you progress so far into a run, the weapons will start getting traits. Traits are buffs or extra effects to the gun in question. A lot of them seemed to pop up on multiple guns, like serrated projectiles, which adds an extra damage over time effect on top of the initial weapon damage. Or weapon specific traits such as the phasing rounds for the Hollow Seeker , which let the projectiles pass through walls. The further you get into a run the more traits you’ll find on weapons. Getting a gun with a nice set of traits can really be a game changer. The portal turret on the Hollow Seeker or the leech rounds on the Carbine where two that I would not let go of the weapon until I found a better gun that also had the trait in question.
Alt fires and consumables were also helpful in a pinch but were not nearly as game changing as the weapon traits. My favorite alt fire was probably the tracking swarm. Just dedicating one of those to a larger enemy always made them less of a chore. Consumables such as the damage siphon and obolite siphon were helpful for getting health back in an emergency and nullifications spheres were great for mitigating the risk on malignant items.
The final two pieces of the loadout puzzle of Returnal are the parasites and the artifacts. Which function similarly but have a key difference. Artifacts can be found at fabricators and are usually purchased with obolites but sometimes can be found as freebies. Artifacts typically buff Selene without any sort of draw back. The astronaut figure allows you to die once without having to reset your run, the adrenaline leech has a vampire kind of effect where doing damage to enemies gives health back, the resin enhancer makes the requirements for upgrading Selene’s health easier to achieve, the list goes on.
The parasites function similarly, but the key difference is that they will come with some form of drawback. So for example, the Constricting Slow Stitch parasite would regen your health a small amount anytime it goes into critical condition but would damage you every time you pick up an item. I quite like the parasites as a mechanic because the give and take made me assess my gameplay style and be aware of how I had to change it up if I even needed to. Getting a parasite that increases the chance of suit malfunctions was always an easy take for me because it was quite simple for me to stop opening the purple chests that would trigger the malfunctions in the first place.
Progressing through Returnal was an interesting experience for me. I found that I was building myself up for more incremental goals rather than trying to make myself strong enough for the run I was on to be the one that takes me all the way. One reason for this is after you clear a biome, usually by beating a boss, you are given a permanent key or piece of equipment that lets you pass straight on to the next one. In fact, after you clear biome two, you receive an item that opens a path back in biome 1 that leads to biome 3. So after you clear an area, you only have to stick around or go back there if you think the payoff in weapons or buffs that you could find would be worth it. For me it settled into a pattern of building myself up to be strong enough to defeat the boss of the area and then trying to live long enough to find the next goal I would be building myself up for. The hard part was staying alive long enough to feel like I was adequately prepared to take on the challenge I was being faced with.
Image Credit: HouseMarque
The set up for Returnal’s story is as follows: Selene, a space explorer of some variety, was following the distress signal called White Shadow, following the signal causes her to crash land on the planet Atropos. And now she has been caught in a cycle where every time she dies, she is returned to the site of the crash. By the time the player takes control of Selene this appears to have happened several times, one of the first things that will happen is Selene finding her own dead body.
From there the game cryptically drip feeds more details about a number of things, such as Selene’s past, the society that used to exist on Atropos, and just what is the White Shadow signal that Selene was following. The game does a good job of cultivating a level of intrigue and playing with a lot of cool psychological and even a touch of cosmic horror themes. However, I feel like for all of the intrigue Returnal sets up, some of the payoff comes up short. Now Returnal’s story is certainly one that leaves a lot open for interpretation so this could be attributed to me not having all of the information, or misinterpreting some details, but I feel like I was paying a fair amount of attention to all of the information the game was presenting and by the end I still had a lot of question marks hanging over my head. Still, I enjoyed learning about Atropos and Selene enough for the story to be a cool supplement to the already enjoyable game play loop.
Image Credit: HouseMarque
Returnal looks great. All of the environments on Atropos are varied as well as quite atmospheric. The first two biomes juxtapose each other quite nicely, the first one is a perpetually rainy forested area that’s rather gloomy but could still be filled with life. The second area by contrast is a red and orange wasteland that looks like any life that used to be there had been long since snuffed out. I won’t go into detail on the rest of the areas but they were also delights to look at. The creature designs are also appropriately varied, they all very much seemed like they were products of the environments of the biomes that they inhabited.
Since Returnal is one of the first truly next generation exclusives on the PS5, dualsense integration is something I have to talk about. I should specify that if all of the haptic integration that the dualsense controller is not your thing it can be adjusted or shut off entirely. As for how Returnal uses the haptics, oh doctor! If this how PlayStation exclusives use the controller going forward I am quite jazzed about it.
Firstly, the adaptive triggers do a great job of adjusting for each gun that you can pick up, so it makes them feel different in your hands as well as different in how you’d be playing with them. And on the L2 button, you can push the trigger in half way to do the typical aim closer thing that you would expect, but pushing it down all the way is what gives you your alt fire. This particular implementation isn’t super mind blowing, but the idea that developers can now get more mileage out of the buttons on the controller is pleasing. Aside from how it effects control the Dualsense also does wonders for the immersion, the example that sticks out the most to me is how it will mimic the rainfall in the first biome if you are standing out in the open. It was a very cool detail. There were other neat details such as the futuristic woosh that the controller would make anytime you would step on a transporter, or the beep and vibration it would make to let you know your alt fire was ready to use again.
Image Credit: HouseMarque
Summary
Returnal’s exhilarating action meshes well with its rougelike structure to create a wonderful gameplay package that I would certainly give my recommendation to. The only things that some may take umbrage with are the length of its runs and its lack of saving in the middle of the runs. But these issues were not enough to stop me from enjoying the satisfying gameplay or the cool atmosphere. Overall its probably the most fun I’ve had so far with a game release this year, and if this is what’s on offer at the start of the console generation, I’m excited to see what’s to come.