It takes a lot to make a player want to scrape themselves off the floor and try again. Dying isn't fun, losing isn't fun and doing both repeatedly is the foundation of the Roguelike genre, in which fatalities are permanent and only certain skills, abilities or items persist between lives. Last year, Hades found a way to make this repetition exciting, rewarding and interesting – compelling you with great writing and moreish combat loops that warranted its gut-wrenching frustrations.
Returnal fails to do that, delivering much of what developer Housemarque is fabulously talented at – gorgeous worlds and wonderfully fluid combat – while forgetting that death holds significant weight when built so firmly into the core of the play experience. It is an eternally punishing game whose mechanics can feel like they're constantly stacked against your progress. Where Hades seemed to reward retries, Returnal seems to relish them without offering much in return. I ended up just… giving up.
The ingredients are all there for a game I should love, though, especially after this year's Covid-induced drought of big new games to dig into. It’s truly weird and unconventional, sprinkling the breadcrumbs of a mysterious narrative in a rich sci-fi universe that benefits from all the new visual sparkle of a Playstation 5. Split into six visually contrasting biomes, it’s a lovely thing to look at, rich with colour and detail and contrast. The first of its worlds, for example, is a dark, blue-hued and smoky forest, littered with the remnants of an extraterrestrial race. It’s slightly derivative and reeks of those early glimpses of LV-246 in Alien, with HR Giger-esque designs to boot, but it really works.
Playing as space astronaut Selene, you crash land on the planet Atropos, having been in pursuit of a broadcast signal enigmatically called White Shadow. Of course, being an action game, the planet you land on is in no way friendly to space astronauts called Selene, so you end up in a constant game of shooty-shoots (which does, admittedly, feel absolutely fantastic) in order to survive.
Except when you fail to survive, you die and come back to life, forced to replay the loop and, in most cases, arduously trudge back to wherever you were before. It’s a constant game of forwards and back, the aim being that you uncover more of Returnal's central mystery and better yourself with each successive perishing. So there’s resurrection. (Weird!) Then you find some of your dead bodies on the planet already. (Weird!) And is that a manifestation of the house you grew up in randomly appearing in the woods on this alien moon? (Super weird!)
The enigma of this live/die/repeat setup is something I really enjoyed within its first few hours, but beyond that Returnal failed to captivate me enough to keep me coming back to life. Not because the story itself is poor or that these mysterious crumbs don’t tempt you to want to discover more. It’s just so ruthless – in a way that doesn’t feel constructive to your learning.
This is all down to the punishing nature of combat. It’s frenetic and Doom-like in its constant acceleration, rarely ratcheting down the speed once it gets going. There are a bunch of weapons and power-ups to find and the moment-to-moment act of taking down enemies feels fantastic. Fluid, fast, responsive, it’s all there for a game that’s smooth as silk in the hands. But its levelling mechanics feel penal to the extreme. With every successive wave of enemies you clear without taking a single bit of damage, you level up your adrenaline. This means you get a buff or ability to help you more easily take down enemies. There are five levels in total, and by the fifth you feel suitably powerful.
However, take a single hit and you lose all your levels. Die and you start again with your pistol. So many times I got further than I had got before, only to get hit once and lose all that hard-earned progress. Suddenly you’re powerless again and having to trek back from point A to point B can often take ages. It doesn’t feel fun or like a lesson at all. When combat gets as manic as it does in Returnal, with projectiles flying everywhere, it never feels much like skill to survive unscathed. So many of my successful tries felt based on pure luck. So many of my failures felt like misfortune.
The result is a game that has everything I wanted to love, but when the stakes are this high, unfair design is unforgivable. No doubt some PS5 owners will love the gauntlet that Returnal offers – the satisfaction of progress, when it all clicks together, can be excellent. But it’s not a game that respects your time. So I’ll just go back and play Hades instead – a game made retroactively even better now that its greatest strengths have been laid bare by Returnal's shortcomings.
£69.99. amazon.co.uk
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