It’s 04:15 in the morning and I just fell before one of the first bosses in Returnal , the new time-looping shooter for PS5 . I’ve only been with him for a few hours, but they have been more than enough to know that this is about navigating between the most bitter frustration and the most absolute devotion.
The time seems the ideal to close the day and go to bed, but the accumulated tension is enormous and, despite the defeat, the little progress compared to previous games tastes like triumph.
Hungrier than sleepy, I sit in front of the TV, turned off and turned into a mirror, thinking about what I can put in my mouth to celebrate the milestone. Meanwhile, I do what the body asks of you when you’re not playing Returnal : think of Returnal .
From indifference to unconditional love
Leveraged on the couch, I remember how little I gave for him a few weeks ago and how, in a sense, I have the feeling that the majority of the public is in a similar situation. Despite being the first major PS5 exclusive – sorry, Destruction AllStars – and coming from a renowned and acclaimed studio, it is surrounded by a certain aura of indifference.
Nor do I think that the general perception is the same as mine, I simply see that not being a Kratos or the title of a study that has us used to triple A, is the main culprit in that situation. In my case, my eyebrow arched was caused by that leap towards something else that, silly me, I didn’t think I needed Housemarque .
The also jewel creators such as Resogun , Nex Machina and Super Stardust had already fallen in love with me with an excellent hand for the arcade and, selfishly, what my body asked me was that, a bullet hell with more fun than pretensions. Not a Returnal with the ambition to unite two worlds as far apart as the originality of the indie and the consecrated of a Sony blockbuster.
What was understandable a few days ago becomes sad at that moment and, to remedy it, I take it for granted that my task is to turn Returnal into one of those flags that I exalt, with more force than normal, to place it in the place it deserves .
Because regardless of how much or how little you might like the game -and I would be surprised if you came to it with a will and the latter happened-, what the Finnish studio achieved, uniting the originality and freshness of indie with the vertigo of the arcade and dress it up as a peach, it is not something you see every day.
Your favorite vanilla and roguelike indie ice cream now comes with a chocolate coating and triple A. Suddenly I know what I’m going to fill my crop with before I go to bed. Today’s achievement deserves an ice cream before bed.
An unnecessary story that turns out to be a must
It’s 04:15 in the morning and, after a cinematic capable of uniting cuteness and giant squid in the same frame, I just understood why Returnal deserved to tell a story. The recent experience is one of those moments that I know for good that I will remember for life. One of those girito-shaped slaps capable of taking away any nonsense, the kind you don’t see coming.
The story of Selene, the female astronaut who crashes on an alien planet and is trapped in a loop that she is forced to relive each time she falls before one of the game’s multiple critters, turns out to be much more than an excuse to give her soul Roguelike and sneak cinematic faces into a seemingly more arcade than narrative shooter.
He has just gained all the sense in the world and, despite his experience in space settings and time travel – with the obvious of Interstellar or Alien but also with what is less a movie theater and more like Coherence or Predestination -, Returnal has just leave me broken and surprised.
Faced with the impossibility of sleeping after what I have just experienced, I decide to open a beer to celebrate – not just any beer, a good IPA, which the occasion deserves – the pleasant surprise that this game has become.
I think, with a smile from ear to ear, how funny it would be to title the future analysis with something along the lines of ” Returnal, the game you came to for bullet hell and stayed for mental straws .”
Beyond the throwaway arcade
It’s 04:15 in the morning and I think that, finally, I’m starting to get the hang of the difficulty of this insane shot salad. A few hours ago I wrote on Twitter that I thought I was good at video games until I started playing Returnal , but now I might as well replicate that “ I know kung-fu ” thing.
It all comes down to not going with the flow as he easily climbs dizzyingly in his games. Go to it with a patience that, for example, invites you to think about how that type of rifle will change when you continue to use it to unlock its many improvements.
Added in the form of weaponry perks that, based on lightning or drone bullets, will become common when you find a weapon of the same style again. Because of how well you do when you finish off the small but very tough hordes of enemies that appear, you decide to make the most of it every time you pick it up.
In addition to shooting with an aim that requires all your attention -but also lax enough to hit while jumping and making lateral movements avoiding the huge amount of colored balls that are pouncing on you-, you remain attentive to two key aspects of the delivered shooting scheme by Housemarque .
On the one hand, the active reload that allows you to improve the following bullets in the purest Gears of War style. On the other, the noise of the controller that tells you that your secondary attack is ready.
By pressing the aim button a little harder, forcing it all the way down instead of stopping at a kind of stop that appears midway, you switch to secondary fire.
One of those DualSense cucamonatas that could easily have been tied to another button, but here seems the perfect excuse to celebrate the novelty while speeding up the process of preparing for the special shot that is to come, either in the form of your own rain of balls or guided missiles that sweep the stage and save your ass.
Whatever it is, faced with another situation of stress and absolute tension like the one experienced in any Returnal run from start to finish, it will be welcome.
Dodging boredom as if it were another colored bullet
It is 04:15 in the morning and I think that the room that I have just left behind I have already traveled hundreds of times. I am surprised that, with how pejiguero I am for these things, Returnal has not yet made me heavy despite having repeated the same formula so many times.
The efficient cleaning of the area that you have just completed, another of those small changing scenarios that you already know by heart and that serves as a piece to shape the world that is rearranged in each game, is followed by a meticulous exploration in search of weapons and objects .
For that of trying to make each game different, in the worst case you will find a cursed object or a parasite, the two risk reward systems that offer you something good while penalizing you on the other hand. The first with a limitation that can be healed after certain actions such as killing X enemies. The second with a coin with two sides, the good and the bad, that you must decide if it is worth it to drag until the end of the game.
In the best of cases, you will find your favorite rifle with the best possible additions, an improvement for the weapons progress bar -which marks the minimum level of the weapons that you will find from now on-, a cache of precious stones to buy that 10% damage improvement you just saw in the previous area, and a double portion to keep increasing your life bar and, with it, your chances of moving forward.
You often think that maybe you should skip all of this, run forward to the next biome change – where as soon as I enter I will find a stone to improve my weapon progress and adapt it to that level – and be able to pick up the game from where I left off. in the last death. But I feel like the only thing I’m doing with that is playing Returnal badly.
To anticipate my fall while limiting my chances of survival not only with a much lower health bar than I would have to go room after room scrutinizing every corner, but also without some valuable and uncomfortable parasites that can completely turn the game around.
The moment Returnal clicks
It’s 04:15 in the morning and I just completed one of those atypical Returnal runs . Which normally involves crashing its protagonist against the same wall over and over again, reviving and dying from absurd mistakes or enemies that seem insurmountable, suddenly give away one of those games that you’d like to frame and hang on the living room in front of your partner’s disapproving look.
It’s the point where the seeming simplicity of yet another shooting game decides, for one reason or another, to click your head. Not only do you worry about picking up the best weapon you can find on the ground and shooting the bad guys in order to advance, now there is a strategy behind it that is less about numbers and more about the text that each object you find offers.
What until then were cycles of life and death of just half an hour, suddenly becomes a linear adventure that lasts beyond the hour in which you are advancing, biome by biome, to face rooms, enemies and improvements that you’ve never seen before.
Not only do you gain what you have learned, you also get new permanent objects that you will keep during the following games to be able to reach, as if it were a metroidvania , areas that previously seemed inaccessible.
Between that and the shortcuts created, Returnal has gone from being a very tough nut to crack with the constant repetition of the same section, to an experience that you are wanting to repeat again from the beginning to access new secrets that you have been seeing there, completely unattainable, since you crawled out of the ship.
The important thing is the way
It is 04:15 in the morning and the final monster of the game has just beaten me in my first encounter with him. There is one day left to publish the analysis and I need to finish Returnal before I even consider what to write. But what in other cases could lead to a situation of stress and frustration, right now is calm and pride.
I have come to him in a methodical way, with the calm that Housemarque’s work requires to advance properly and with a character sufficiently improved to have almost no impediments when exploring.
I’ve done it too with a hefty health bar and my weapon of choice, but the bullet hell presented may be too much for me. Maybe I can never get over there because, frankly, I don’t know if I can do better. I think it was by far my best run to date.
But surprisingly everything is fine and it doesn’t bother me in the least. As in Lost , what matters here is not the end, but the path that has led you to it.
I know what I must say about Returnal to convey my experience and give a good account of what awaits you in this magnificent shooting game with exquisite playability and surprising story.
I know I must praise how the HD vibration transmits the raindrops on your hands when you are not indoors, how the formidable house brand gunplay translates into the perfect excuse to keep playing, and how it is able to hook you until the late hours. with a formula just as addictive as any other roguelike that comes to mind.
How, what seems like a simplistic experience disguised as triple A, little by little is opening up. Like a rose when it finishes blooming and offers its best face just when it is about to begin to die. How its sadly outdated beauty, despite its last breath, still has an angle that you have not seen and a detail that is worth stopping to admire.
It’s 04:15 in the morning and I’ve gotten out of bed for a while to write the Returnal review . I was thinking of doing it in the morning, with less time and also less sleep, but you know what happens when you’re not playing Returnal , that you keep thinking about it even when you close your eyes because of its Tetris effect.
I am about to write with a feeling that navigates between pride, a certain hint of sorrow and an overflowing joy. They all go hand in hand because, even though the situation seemed to dictate otherwise, a few hours ago I managed to finish off the final boss of Returnal and saw the credits drop.
It is clear where pride comes from, but you probably also imagine where that pain comes from. To start writing about him is, in a sense, also to say goodbye to him.
That it is a glimpse of sorrow instead of a blow to the heart is thanks to that ray of light that, in the form of a promising endgame , will have me walking through the Returnal biomes looking for portions of sun for a few more weeks to finish joining the puzzle it’s his story.
Perhaps not with the same insistence because current affairs and work have other paths in store for me, but there is little intention of leaving it behind forever, and I will continue to scratch time slots to go to their daily runs whenever I can.
The overflowing joy is less obvious, but it deserves the greatest of celebrations. Besides playing Returnal and thinking about Returnal , now I will also be able to talk openly about it.
Discuss it with my colleagues, share it with you in the comments and, above all, read how the gaming community surrenders, gets frustrated and goes out of their way for one of this year’s strong GOTY candidates. I hope you enjoy it with the same intensity with which I have been able to do it.
Essential
Returnal
| Platforms | PS5 |
|---|---|
| Multiplayer | Not |
| Developer | Housemarque |
| Company | Sony |
| Launch | April 30, 2021 |
The best
- A fantastic mix of mechanics and styles.
- A gunplay to frame.
- An addictive challenge that could last for years and still get short.
Worst
- There are sections that can be very complicated.
- Someone else hang up on time that a good run has annoyed me.
