Review: Returnal Is a Gripping, Immersive Triumph for the Roguelike Genre

Housemarque’s brilliant roguelike is so immersive that it’s viscerally hard to walk away from it.

Returnal
Photo: Sony Interactive Entertainment

ASTRA space scout Selene Vassos crash lands her ship, Helios, on the forbidden planet Atropos and, after encountering the remains of her own corpse, swiftly dies at the hands of a tentacled, pouncing kerberon. A degree in Greek mythology isn’t needed to understand that there’s a deeper significance to many of the characters and creatures in Returnal, and that what looks alien—like the game’s first boss, a three-limbed, fire-wielding monstrosity named for the goddess of horror, Phrike—might be all too horrifyingly familiar under the surface. It’s a suspicion confirmed by the incongruous presence of Selene’s rustic house, found in the middle of the Overgrown Ruins’s dusky jungle terrain. There’s a reason each death resets Selene back to the wreckage of her vehicle, and the reward of unraveling this mystery with each new loop helps to lessen the sting of the game’s savage difficulty.

Without giving too much away, Returnal is meant to be unfair. Life and, by extension, death often are, and there’s a sense that Selene’s time on Atropos is a punishment. That’s hardcoded into every element of her journey across the campaign: many chests and health restoration items are laced with a malignancy that can trigger ability-hampering malfunctions (debuffs); fabricating artifacts is often random (and expensive); and parasitic boosts are always paired with a negative effect. But it’s a credit to the developers at Housemarque that regardless of what weapons you find yourself equipped with—like the up-close Spitmaw Blaster or long-range Electropylon Driver—it always feels pleasurable to strafe around neon-bullet-filled arenas, taking down turrets, Groot-like fungal monsters, dive-bombing bats, and so many tentacled monstrosities that you may think you’re living inside an H.P. Lovecraft novel.

We may not necessarily know what Selene needs to learn or what the significance of a haunting, mysterious Astronaut is, but each run of Returnal provides players with clear goals. By finding xenoglyphs, players can start to translate (albeit automatically) the alien stelae, and the various weapons come with traits and alt-firing techniques that can be permanently unlocked through use. Even dying tends to bring rewards in the game, in the form of new audio Scout Logs—eerie messages recorded by Selene from a different point in the loop.

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This sort of progression is reminiscent of Motion Twin’s Dead Cells, in that players, as they unlock upgrades like a vine-hacking melee weapon or dodge-assisting grappling hook, can reach new items and shortcuts on subsequent runs through the game’s procedurally generated biomes. Frustration can most certainly set in after a series of botched runs, especially once you’ve unlocked most of the traits available at that tier and are just stuck at a boss, but again, it’s a credit to Housemarque’s addictive arcade-action bona fides that even losing actual hours of progress due to a temporarily broken patch doesn’t feel like a deterrent.

Returnal is so immersive that it’s viscerally hard to walk away from it—and not just because it eschews a title screen and uses the haptic feedback of the DualSense controller to let you feel the patter of raindrops and fully-charged weapon abilities. Each biome has been carefully chosen to not only provide players with unique challenges as they move from thicketed jungles to wide open desert ruins, but also to subtly convey Selene’s emotional state. The first act’s loop is all heightened hope, with Selene tracking a mysterious radio transmission through a ruined mountain shrine in the Crimson Wastes and up the massively vertical Derelict Citadel. The second act, set 63 years later, dispenses with such literally lofty missions, as the focus shifts to Selene descending to the depths of despair, the Fractured Wastes now frozen over (with regret) before giving way to the underwater Abyssal Scar.

The more you learn about Selene across the game’s gripping campaign, the easier it is to relate to or, at least, agree with her observation that “I deserve to be here.” That line is also more than a little apt, as it perfectly sums up just how simultaneously rewarding and punishing it is to live in the world of Returnal. Each time you make a perfect jump and air-dash to avoid a cluster of bullets, you earn your way forward, and each time you awkwardly fall off a cliff or gawk as an explosive squid flies at you, you earn the right to try it all over again. The terse thrill of all that fragility makes this a timeless adventure well worth returning to.

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Sony Interactive Entertainment did not respond to our request for review code. The game was reviewed with a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.

Score: 
 Developer: Housemarque  Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: April 30, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Mild Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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