![]() Sometimes you find audio logs, and they are supremely chilling. If you’re going to spend hours stuck in a place like this, it helps that it’s so interesting to look at.Īfter a while, you start coming across Selene’s other selves – corpses, or maybe not. The planet looks and sounds extraordinary, each new area a distinctive biotechnological nightmare. This is a cutting-edge game with the DNA of some of gaming’s oldest genres, the arcade shoot-em-up, and it’s a fascinating combination. ![]() It’s an unlikely comparison, but Mario is the only other game I can think of where I’ve felt so perfectly in control of a character’s movement. It helps tremendously that all the shooting and running and leaping just feel so good, no matter how often you do it. Like the dark fantasy masterpiece Dark Souls, and Demon’s Souls before it, Returnal feels impenetrable and mysterious and sometimes even unfair, but opens itself up to a committed player. I’ve always been drawn to games like this. A momentary lapse of concentration in the heat of a fight can be enough to dispense with half your health bar, leaving you weakened before the next encounter.Īll of this is painful, but I always felt as if I had a chance – that next time I’d find out more about what the everliving hell had happened on this planet, or discover one of the rare artefacts or upgrades that Selene gets to keep, or squeak out of a fight that was very much not in my favour with a sliver of health and the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. You never know whether your next run will last two hours or 10 minutes. ![]() Because the planet changes every time, you never know whether the chamber ahead contains something useful, or a crowd of enemies that you’re not strong enough to face yet. ![]() But still I kept playing.Įverything in Returnal is a gamble, really. Over and over, I was sent back to the beginning. I kept coming across malignant items that caused my suit to malfunction when I picked them up, or falling through the floor to find a super-powerful mortar-firing turtle waiting for me, or opening chests to discover aggressive flying manta rays instead of a decent weapon. After that, it took me almost two days to get any further on every attempt I seemed plagued by bad luck or failing skill. By the time I got to the next boss, I was already struggling, and I flubbed it by sprinting into a pit trying to run away from a sword-wielding faceless alien that kept materialising behind my back. Unfortunately, my shotgun turned out to be next to useless in the desert, which was mostly populated by ominous floating cubes with tentacles. ![]() Movement and shooting are so fast in Returnal, so instinctive, that when things are going well you feel like the archdemon of bullet hell, surviving against the odds. I danced through every altercation, dashing and jumping and sprinting around mesmerising patterns of plasma orbs and bullets to get up close. I found plenty of green pickups to refill and expand my health bar, and a weird alien machine-thing that resurrected me, and an upgrade for my suit that let me do more damage the closer Selene got to death. I got lucky with a weapon I found early on, a shotgun-style thing with a secondary-fire mode that sent a horizontal wall of pain towards encroaching creatures. My first afternoon with Returnal took me through that jungle, past a couple of truly terrifying boss creatures, and through a Stargate-style portal to the arid ruins of the planet’s second area, the Crimson Wastes, in one epic four-hour run. Every time Selene dies – and this will be very often – she finds herself back at the crash site, in the middle of a jungle that remixes itself subtly every time, having lost every useful weapon or trinket or ability modifying parasite that she gathered on the last run. If it moves, it will try to kill you, and you’d better shoot back. ![]()
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