New gear also opens new paths in starting areas, and in the case of the zippy hookshot grappling beam, adds another dimension to combat. Each significant achievement equates to permanent progress, as Metroid-like keys and upgrades shortcut you through portals or across chasms. It’s a story that dissects the roguelike, extracts the organs it needs, discards the rest, and elegantly replaces what’s lost. In this way, any gripes that Returnal lacks some of the iterative comforts of other modern roguelikes feel beside the point. Everything from demoralising ambushes to the ecstasy of vanquishing bullet-hell bosses melds with Selene’s mental tremors as she chases answers, recoils into nihilistic spirals, then spies a fresh glimmer of hope.
To play it is to be in Selene’s head, and in the loop – there’s not even a title screen to exit to for respite. Other games do time loops, but none capture the terror of facing an eternity, or the growing desperation, the way Returnal does. Yet aside from a gut-punching midpoint twist, its impact stems less from the plot than the overlap between your own toil and Selene’s struggle to comprehend her situation, alone in a loop that never ends.Īs you stumble across voice recordings left by past (or future?) Selene corpses, and Selene’s own thoughts echo in your ears, Returnal spellbinds in the meeting of your states of mind. Its key is in Selene’s personal backstory and in Greek mythology, with names cribbed with a pertinent nod from old gods, goddesses, and titans.
The real surprise is how they’ve worked this immaculate action around a quietly powerful narrative.
With Housemarque’s pedigree, none of this is unexpected, except perhaps how clinically they’ve upscaled. Swirling particles, meaty blasts, and an unrelenting pace harmonise until this impossible, shifting world of combat arenas and laser traps makes perfect sense. The crisp chirp as your secondary fire mode recharges. The honking siren as robotic security forces react to your presence. The tentacles – so many tentacles – squirming for a second after their owners have been shot to goo. Yet the whole thing coheres with convincing visual and audio detail. The close opening jungle, interrupted by ruins and stalked by pack predators, warps into a pastel-red desert, wide and planted with stone settlements, where floating cuboid squid gob out waves of hot plasma. It prods you to improvise manoeuvres that many games would reserve for their proudest set-pieces, then to break walls or find beneficial uses for man-eating vines, to excavate the treasures tucked in its nooks.įrom colour palette to ominous alien music, each biome recalls a different sci-fi aesthetic.
Atropos is varied and bountiful, compressing, elongating, or fragmenting its structures. It silently hopes you’ll be daring and observant, and readies rewards for when you are. The frictionless flow is ideal for one of those precious games that offers the faintest of guiding hands, leaving you to test its systems, the limits of naturally forming cover points, and the risks of stasis in open space. DualSense rumble is the only reminder that her bounding, strafing, and dashing doesn’t stream direct from your cerebral cortex. Control of Selene, your tormented protagonist, is instinctive to the point you can almost finish the tutorials’ sentences for them. More complex than Housemarque’s usual wares, it’s no less immediate or precise, doing so much so well with such little fuss. It even makes Vanquish look a little pudgy. It’s a twitch injection into third-person shooters – as close to Robotron as Gears of War. Returnal is what happens when you let the masters of arcade revamps like Resogun and Nex Machina loose with a sizeable budget.
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