Returning to Returnal - Article
by Paul Broussard , posted on 16 April 2023 / 6,507 Views
It’s been almost two years now since the release of Returnal, a game I was very excited for when it was announced but only sort of excited for by the time it released. Since then, Returnal has received a number of significant updates that add a lot of value to the experience, and with the title having just been ported to PC, I felt it was worth revisiting the PlayStation 5’s first major first-party title and seeing how it’s changed, where it’s improved, and where some problems still remain.
If you’re not familiar with Returnal, the elevator pitch for it is probably something like “Metroid, but a roguelite.” You play as Selene, a solitary female space explorer whose face model even looks a bit like Samus' design from Metroid Prime Remastered. The story kicks off with Selene exploring space and stumbling upon a distress signal emanating from the uncharted planet Atropos. After entering the planet’s atmosphere, she crash lands, which somehow winds up only being the second worst thing to happen to her that day as she soon discovers dead versions of herself littering the planet. One supposed-to-lose introductory boss fight later and the reason behind those corpses becomes clear: Selene is now trapped in an endless cycle of dying and respawning at the moment of the crash, and can only hope to break the cycle by venturing into the planet and bopping some bosses on the head.
The core gameplay has remained unchanged from the initial PS5 release. Returnal takes place almost exclusively from a third person perspective (more on when it doesn’t in a bit) and you’re tasked with exploring a partially randomized region of Atropos, searching for a portal to the next area (which is usually hidden behind a boss fight of some sort). Along the way you can expect to run into some platforming, traps, stat-boosters and, of course, a whole bunch of squiggly tentacle thingies that want you dead.
Combat is the big selling point. There’s a huge emphasis on movement here, to the point where it feels a bit reminiscent of a mid 90s boomer shooter. With the exception of the couple of jerks who have homing attacks, enemies can’t lead their shots to save their lives, so constantly moving and grappling to different points around the arena is not only fun, it’s good for survival too. If you find yourself dying repeatedly in Returnal, chances are the problem is you weren’t moving enough. The gunplay feels really good, and two years later the game’s overcharge mechanic, which lets you immediately reload your gun if you press the fire button with proper timing, is just as satisfying as it was when it debuted.
But let’s talk differences, since this is supposed to be highlighting what’s changed since the original PS5 launch. One of my complaints with the original version was the lack of any sort of suspend feature, which meant that if you needed to stop playing for a bit, the PS5’s rest mode was the only way to do so without losing your run. Individual cycles in Returnal can get quite long; if you’re lucky enough to get some good artifacts and parasites, a run can easily last a couple of hours, if not more. Losing that much progress is already frustrating when death is your fault, but it becomes enough to inspire a supervillain backstory if it’s out of your control entirely due to a power outage or the game automatically updating in the middle of the night (yes, this really happened).
Thankfully, that is now fixed. There’s an option included to suspend and exit the game whenever you’re not in immediate danger. It also seems like, at least on PC, Returnal no longer starts you back at the very beginning in the event of the game suddenly being turned off (I tried exiting it in task manager both in and out of combat to simulate crashes, and each time it returned me to exactly where I was). So, based on that alone, the title earns points for being far more user friendly than it was before.
There are also a couple of entirely new features added since Returnal’s launch, namely the Tower of Sisyphus and cooperative play. Let’s start with the less immediately clear one. The Tower of Sisyphus is an endless combat arena with wave after wave of enemies. Battles take place on a bunch of floating arenas hanging in a skybox that looks like it was taken straight from one of those Outsider segments in Dishonored, and killing all of the enemies in one wave lets you activate a teleporter that takes you to the next one. You’re rewarded for killing enemies quickly, with a score counter that has a multiplier. This multiplier increases with each kill but drops when you go more than a couple seconds without killing anything.
It’s a good setup, but it’s also surprisingly easy; it doesn’t feel balanced like a post-game challenge for the main experience. While I died plenty of times on my first playthrough of the base game, and got tripped up several times on the final area of my initial playthrough on PC, I actually just had to quit out of the Tower of Sisyphus on my lone run because I had already spent 3 hours on it with death nowhere in sight. By the time I finally packed it up and went to bed, I had fully maxed my health bar, was negating over 50% of damage due to protection upgrades, and had long ago picked up a max level weapon that decimated nearly everything with a separate self-targeting laser.
In fairness, the Tower does do some things to make sure you’ll lose eventually. Every 20 stages ends with a boss fight that inflicts a permanent malfunction upon its defeat, and enemies do increase in level continuously, while you will eventually hit a cap on weapon level and suit health. If I had sunk another couple hours or so into things, I’m sure I would’ve met my end sooner or later. But 4-5 hours seems like one hell of a time sink to play what essentially amounts to side content, especially when - and I can’t believe I have to bring this up again - the baffling decision has once again been made to not let the player suspend the run and return later. Seriously, Housemarque? You finally realized that the base game, with its 2-3 hour runs, needs a suspend option, but you somehow failed to learn the same lesson for the challenge run mode that involves an even larger time investment?
The other gameplay addition is co-op, which works as a surprisingly natural fit for this kind of game. At any time, before leaving the starting area for a run in the base game, you can enter a sphere to call a player to your world or transport yourself to another world. And it’s undeniably fun. It does trivialize the harder difficulty that Returnal is going for a bit, as one player can draw aggro and another can just pick enemies off from relative safety, and even if someone does get tripped up you can revive them, but it’s hard to complain too much because it’s just really fun. Returnal’s standard gameplay was already great, but being able to grapple three stories in the air and air dash while scrambling to blast some black tentacle monster on the ground with a partner just makes it even better. The one downside is that Returnal’s stubborn insistence on annoyingly few options to take a break from the game returns here, somehow even bigger and badder. It’s flat out impossible to suspend a run while in co-op, meaning that if you’re playing on PC, you either beat the entire game in one go or you lose all your progress - there's no in-between.
Speaking of those monsters, Returnal doesn’t make it especially clear what they are for a good chunk of the game. There’s an initial heavy emphasis on mystery within Returnal’s world, with relics of a long-since-extinct alien race littering the planet and holographic clues that initially appear to be setting up a compelling backstory for the planet Atropos. Unfortunately, it's all a lie, and this is where I need to set up a big SPOILER warning, because it’s time to talk about Returnal’s plot; probably the most disappointing aspect of the game for me. So if you haven’t played Returnal yet, and want to remain spoiler free, you may want to turn away now.
While I enjoyed the backstory given about the alien race that inhabited Atropos previously, dubbed the “Sentients” by Selene, it feels disappointing that the game does so little with it. Early on it’s established there was some sort of conflict with a separate group called the Severed, who appear to be Sentients corrupted in some way, but that’s about it. We find a variety of holographs around the planet that depict previous events in history, as well as logs that initially promise to describe some aspect of the Sentients’ past, but they all wind up largely being pure flavor text that don’t really explain anything tangible about what’s going on. I’m not opposed to games being vague at times; in fact, I’d argue titles can often benefit from leaving some things to the player’s imagination, but the catch is that even an imagination needs a solid starting point, and unfortunately “good alien faction” and “bad alien faction” just aren’t enough to start any mental sparks.
Of course, by the end of the third area, it’s probably pretty obvious to everyone why so little is being explained, and it’s because the entirety of Returnal takes place in Selene’s head. I will say, on a personal note, I hate stories that pull this card. There’s no quicker way to dispel all stakes and excitement for a narrative than to establish that it’s not really happening, and there’s no faster way to make a world and its lore forgettable than to establish that it never even existed. I really like titles with a heavy emphasis on an isolated atmosphere and exploring a hostile environment, slowly uncovering the backstory of what happened, so I’ll admit that the first time I saw Selene’s 20th century farm-house inexplicably show up on a planet previously untouched by humans, and trudged through a first-person pseudo horror experience, I groaned inwardly at the thought that the game was going to pull a “this was all a dream card.” By the time the fourth area began, I had soured considerably on Returnal's narrative direction.
Revisiting the game, I tried to come into things with a more open mind to what Housemarque was trying to achieve. I may really like tangible plots, but I’m sure there are people who like stories that take place inside of someone’s head, and it’s worth examining the narrative on its own merits. To its credit, I think Returnal’s actual story does try to tackle some pretty weighty themes, like grief, denial, an inability to accept the past, and eventually forgiving yourself and moving on. That being said, even with my own personal biases set to the side, I don’t think it works well here, for two significant reasons.
The first is the sheer ambiguity of events. Even after finishing Returnal twice, I’ll admit I still had a difficult time pinning down exactly what Selene’s backstory was, which is kind of a big deal as it’s the lynchpin for all of the trauma that she has to cope with. It seems like she was rejected as an astronaut (the final nail in the coffin if there was still any doubt about the story being real), and she had a son, but after that, things get much murkier. A car crash is shown as a catalyst for events, but the game makes it seem like the car crash occurred both with Selene’s mom driving while Selene was a child, and with Selene driving as an adult with her son in the back seat. So were there two crashes? Or are memories of one event spilling over into another? Again, I’m all for letting the player put the pieces of a puzzle together, but Returnal feels like it isn’t even giving the player anywhere close to all the pieces necessary to complete the picture.
The other issue is that Selene as a character just isn’t that interesting. Creating a story where the player’s investment hinges on them being able to relate to or care about a character inherently requires that said character have some complexity, but there’s just not much to Selene. While I do want to be open to the idea of games telling stories in different ways, I think this is an inherent limitation on the decision to tell a story where everything takes place inside her head. It means that it’s hard for Selene to actually “do” anything that would define her as a character. All that we really have to go on is what she did in her real life through the fragmented bits of story we can piece together via cut scenes, and the sheer ambiguity of the story makes even that a difficult task. Frankly I have to wonder if even Housemarque has a firm grasp on what the actual lore of Returnal is, or if they just threw a bunch of off-putting imagery into the game and left it to players to try and assemble that into something that made sense.
All of that results in me leaving Returnal with something of a sour taste in my mouth. There’s no doubt that the gameplay is fun. The combat is fast-paced and satisfying, and the inclusion of an actual suspend feature, co-op, and a tower mode, all certainly solidify Returnal as a good game at the very least. But having conquered the world of Atropos twice now, I’ve come away on both occasions feeling very unfulfilled. Between this and Bayonetta 3, I think I’ve come to believe that even titles with a relatively light focus on narrative do still need some overarching reward or pay-off for the player at the end to make their efforts feel worthwhile. After beating Returnal, I’m not certain what, if anything, has changed for Selene. And for as fun as that gameplay is, it’s a tall task for it to wipe away that feeling of “nothing I really did here mattered.”
In many ways that’s why I’d like to see Returnal get a sequel, perhaps more so than any other major Sony IP. There’s an excellent gameplay foundation and some very solid potential for ways in which a Returnal 2 can evolve. The atmosphere and isolated feel of the game are both very potent as well, even if the narrative ambiguities do undermine things a bit. Another try, with a more solid footing in reality and a few gameplay refinements, could easily make a potential sequel one of the PlayStation 5's highlights.
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Well it wasn't the Barbie retrospective, but I found this updated commentary enjoyable reading anyway. Witty, witty! :D I appreciated the updated thoughts since you scored the game wrong the first time. (It's okay. Math is hard.)
In all seriousness though, Returnal has emerged as one of my favorite games. And yes, I will grant you that the certain aesthetic resemblance to the Metroid games is a factor there because I love the whole ambience of the Metroid franchise, in addition to Returnal's combination of genre choice and budget. What's more, honestly I think I basically agree with your take here on the value of the game's post-launch updates. Where I really differ with your take on Returnal though is on its narrative.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD, KIND OF.
Being someone who's lived with post-traumatic stress disorder since I was 11, I find Returnal's metaphor for trauma and other, related mental health struggles an unusually, unromantically honest one. While Selene finds new meaning and joy as she grows older, establishes a successful career and becomes a mom, she still comes back to her personal hell. She still goes through relapses and is cursed to keep reliving her own mistakes (both real and imagined) over and over again forever. She can't forget her son or stop wondering if there was anything she could have done. Her nightmare world keeps changing and becoming clearer in its meaning, but Selene herself not so much. "Eternally wandering, eternally wondering" one commentator aptly put it. It's a hell of her own creation for surviving. Surviving and even sometimes succeeding while others suffered and even died (be it genuinely her fault or not in any given case), and while life might get better, there's no way out of that for her at the end of the day. That might not be a satisfying, crowd-pleasing message, but it's the real truth. I get so sick of shows, movies, games too often portraying challenges like these as things that can definitely be healed, and with a simple and definite formula. Returnal is specifically good at conveying how trauma can affect one over the course of a lifetime, not just at one particular juncture. The story-as-puzzle structure isn't for everyone, I recognize (just as Immortality likewise isn't for everyone for similar reasons), but it's such an apt metaphor for how living feels to me. And no, it's not easy.
I don't mean to get everyone down. I just mean to highlight that I think what Housemarque was going for here thematically was more about promoting understanding and letting those who are struggling with intense, persistent feelings of things like grief, guilt, and trauma feel seen and understood. And no, if this were some literal Metroid-like space adventure, I don't think it would be as effective at doing that.
I own a lot of Housemarque games and as this was their biggest game to date, I'm glad Sony gave them the ability to make it. But it also the only one I actually just stopped playing because I wasn't enjoying it. The game it good, I can recognise that but it's progression seemed lacking, only my own skill was holding me back and essentially high budget rogue like gameplay isn't really what I was looking for, my own thing really. I liked the first previews and the idea of a 3rd person bullet hell to me sounded great, my first few playthroughs were with all the new content you mentioned was late last year and while I got through a lot and the story side of things was intriguing, I never actually beat the final boss. Got there twice. My recorded time is 13 hours, I don't know if that is good or bad but it felt like more. The more I played it felt like I needed to go through every area of every map to get all upgrades to make latter stages achievable and it got repetitive. More so than any roguelike I've played before.
I can understand why a sequel might be on the cards, Housemarque did a great job and they can expand and improve upon what they have created but part of me jut wants them to go back to small twin stick shooters. :P
good article man!
I’m not good at getting platinum trophies, especially in these type of games, but the game hooked me up so much, that I was able to get the platinum about 2 months before Housemarque introduced the suspend cycle which was introduced around September - November 2021 for the PS5 version and the Tower/Co-Op last year.
It’s good to see more people can enjoy this fantastic game.
Nex Machina is my fave game of theirs.
She's hard to look at
Funny game.
