After crash-landing on a mysterious planet, Selene finds herself stuck in a loop. Every time she dies, she returns to the crash site with her memory still intact. What is this place? How can she escape from it? Those are the questions that need to be answered as soon as possible, just don’t think it’s going to be easy.
Discover the planet
When you first start playing Returnal, the story is still covered in a thick layer of mysteries. You don’t know what kind of planet you just crashed upon and you know little to nothing about Selene’s personal life. This isn’t your classic story-driven game where you have to sit through a lengthy introduction of the character and her personality, instead, it’s a show don’t tell experience. Since you’re playing as Selene, you’re as clueless as she is, so the first thing you’ll do after crashing is trying to understand the planet you’re currently on. The only way to do so is to advance to the doors that can be found everywhere. During your first minutes, you’ll immediately notice the rich history of the planet. This isn’t just a dry space rock, it clearly is or was the home of intelligent alien life. The planet is covered with alien statues and alien tech, but it’s not a peaceful place at all.
Soon after your first steps, you’ll encounter some of the deadly creatures that roam this world and you’ll eventually die for the first time, forced to start your exploration again. Selene will die a lot and in order to avoid that, you’ll need to discover the secrets of the planet. It’s here where the Metroid Prime-like gameplay kicks in. Scanning objects is a huge part of Returnal and reminded me of the Metroid Prime games a lot. If you want to advance, you’ll need to understand everything you’ll encounter. From alien plants to alien tech, you’ll need to scan it in order to make sense of it. Besides this, the planet is also filled with clues written in an alien language. The more you scan these symbols, the more you can read and understand their messages, which can be crucial for defeating certain enemies. What Returnal does best is giving you the feeling of total solitude on an alien planet. You really are completely on your own and you don’t have a clue of what’s going on. Sure, the eternal loop is weird, but it all gets a lot weirder the more you investigate it. The way the story unfolds before your eyes is simply put amazingly done and the best part about it is the fact that you are the one discovering the truth. Although exploration and scanning your surroundings is crucial and a main part of the game, it’s not its beating heart. That honor is reserved for hostile encounters.
Find the pattern, defeat them all
Combat is an important mechanic in Retrunal and I have to admit it’s one of the most innovating mechanics I’ve seen in years. At its core, the game feels like a bullet-hell game comparable to the studio’s earlier RESOGUN release. I know, the combination of a bullet-hell with a fast-paced third-person exploration game isn’t something I would have imagined myself, but surprisingly works very well. Each type of enemy you’ll encounter uses a certain pattern of attacks. There are ground-type enemies that fire horizontal lines of plasma (?) at you while flying types might attack you with a couple of sequenced fast attacks. As if this isn’t hard enough to master, you better be prepared when you’re face to face with one of the game’s bosses, it’s at those moments that all hell breaks loose. The bigger enemies attack in patterns similar to the one of the bullet-hell genre and often also have different stages, meaning they’ll change their attacks and patterns. It’s up to you to discover and counter those patterns before it’s too late. Don’t expect to find the solution in a single run, the game is designed around your death, so if you’re not a fan of the harder games, you better stay away from this one. If you’re motivated by this constant defeat and want to improve with each and every run, you’ll love Returnal from start to finish. It’s incredible how the team managed to combine and balance two different genres that aren’t necessarily made for each other. The result? One of the most unique third-person games to date.
As if this wasn’t interesting enough, the developers also decided to add in some Rogue-like elements to the mix, which elevates the level of difficulty a bit further. Just like other Rogue-like games such as the recently released Hades, you never know what to expect once you walk through a door. With every new run, the world around you changes and the layout of the map is never the same. This means you never know what to expect and you better prepare for the worst. To make things a bit more accessible, you’ll find important updates throughout your adventure. After a couple of runs, you’ll get access to some alien tech giving you the possibility to teleport and an extra weapon in the form of an impressive sword. These kinds of important updates are carried over when you die so you have a slight advantage in your next run. The more you play and advance, the more powerful updates you’ll unlock, making it a bit easier to get out of the different sections alive. But, like in most rogue games, not everything is transferable after death, so you’ll have to restart your grind too. In my opinion, the team really managed to find the right balance between transferable updates and your gear completely resetting at the start of a new run. It’s never an easy game but the more you try, the better you’ll eventually become. If you want to advance in the story and want to reach new regions on the planet, you’ll have to put in the work, but in the end, it’s worth the struggle.
Will you find your truth?
Besides the game’s interesting mechanics, Selene remains at the center of it all and her story is both mysterious and extremely interesting. Since discovering her truth and background is one of the game’s most impactful moments, I won’t go into spoiler territory here but I would like to point out how brilliantly the story develops while playing. Every time you die, you’ll see some short glimpses of the truth and Selene’s background, without actually giving away the full truth. It gets a lot more interesting when the game changes to a first-person perspective where you’re looking through the eyes of Selene, desperately trying to figure out what’s going on. The storytelling in Retrunal is unparalleled and offered a constant reminder that you need to push forwards and find the real truth. I often found myself on the verge of giving up but the story captivated me too much to let it go. Everything about it just fits and reminded me of movies like Edge of Tomorrow. That being said, I won’t spoil the fun and let you discover the truth on your own.
Play has no limits
Before we jump to the conclusion of this review, there’s one thing that still needs to be praised, and that’s the technical aspect of this release. After Astro’s Playroom, this is the first game on my PlayStation 5 that really feels next-gen as it takes advantage of the console’s raw power. Take the SSD for example, thanks to this, you can seamlessly go for a new run after you die without having to look at long loading screens. It sounds like a small update but for its genre, it’s very crucial. Since you’ll die a lot, it’s good to know that you won’t waste a lot of time doing so. Did you die? No problem, try again in mere seconds! This really elevates the quality of life a lot. But, of course, it doesn’t end there as the game also makes good use of the DualSense controller. Thanks to the haptic triggers, you can really feel your environment evolving around you. Imagine Selene standing in the rain, and you feeling those raindrops thanks to the subtle haptic feedback, it’s here and it benefits the immersion tremendously. The haptic feedback is also used to give a different feeling to every weapon and its alternative fire mode. To make it even more real, the game uses the DealSense speaker to give you audio prompts so you know when your weapon is fully loaded or recharged without ever taking you out of the action. Still not convinced? Well, try this game with 3D audio and I’m sure you’ll be blown away by how real and ominous it suddenly feels. Don’t be mistaken by some screenshots, this is by far one of the most impressive PlayStation 5 games to date.
Conclusion:
When I first started playing Returnal I didn’t know what to expect but I was never prepared for this. The combination of different genres and finding the right balance to make it all work isn’t an easy task and yet, Returnal succeeded in doing so with ease. The story is captivating from the first glimpses and the gameplay is challenging enough to keep pushing you to your limits. It’s an odd game to describe since there simply isn’t something comparable on the market. If you’re looking for one of the weirdest, hardest, most captivating, and most rewarding games on PlayStation 5, this is the one you need. Don’t hesitate, jump in, die, start over, and eventually, find the truth. It’s a difficult journey but it’s a journey you’ll remember until you die… And maybe even after that.
