I've debated for a long time whether to play this game, afraid that I wouldn't like the roguelike style. While roguelike still has a long way to go before becoming my favourite genre, as I am fond of permanent character development and builds, this game is nothing short of phenomenal and is easily one of the best first-party games available on PS5.
The game looks and runs fantastically, and particular praise should go to the excellent sound design. Returnal can also be notoriously challenging, where mistakes are heavily punished and good runs can be quickly ruined by even minor missteps. Luckily, the suspend feature that was retroactively added, together with the almost non-existent loading times, makes everything more manageable.
The completionist side, however, can be extremely tedious, with heavy RNG elements and repeated runs for collectables that contradict how the game was intended to be played.
The game looks and runs fantastically, and particular praise should go to the excellent sound design. Returnal can also be notoriously challenging, where mistakes are heavily punished and good runs can be quickly ruined by even minor missteps. Luckily, the suspend feature that was retroactively added, together with the almost non-existent loading times, makes everything more manageable.
The completionist side, however, can be extremely tedious, with heavy RNG elements and repeated runs for collectables that contradict how the game was intended to be played.
excellent roguelike, it's really challenging and fun
I would buy a PS5 just for this game. This is a console seller much like Demons Souls was for me.
The absolute hardcore difficulty of it with an absolutely mine boggling story that is a heart wrenching all while having some of the best gameplay I’ve ever experience as well as showcasing just how amazing the DualSense is as a controller, makes Returnal easily one of the best games I’ve ever played.
It’s a shame that the games difficulty turns away so many players because it genuinely is an experience unlike any other.
If you’re a fan of Hades and Binding of Isaac, imagine a third person bullet hell version of that with intense horror elements. That’s what this game is and it hits every single note that it’s trying to achieve and expands on already existing ideas.
It takes the run based genre and goes with a heavy story that is gripping from the start. It may have some of the best atmospheric story telling in any game I’ve played. It matches the Souls series in every way. Subtle references lie in wait, alien dialect reveals the plot in strange ways.
The entire meaning of the game is so gorgeous and so impactful. I was left stunned by its ending.
It is hard to talk about this fantastic game without mentioning the controller and audio design.
I was always concerned the DuelSense would be a gimmick but Returnal proves it’s not. Every gun feels different. Every step I take, every bit of rain, every enemy attack feels and waves past the controller that immerses beyond just seeing what’s on the screen.
The audio as well, is just gorgeous. You honestly can tell where enemies are by the slight sound behind you with the 3D audio. It genuinely helped me in tight spots and every second matters in this game.
Returnal is honestly a fun, unique, extremely loveable game that sadly is turned away by it’s difficulty.
It deserves a round of a million applauses and has easily spiked itself up into my top PlayStation games of all time.
From the bottom of my run based heart.
The absolute hardcore difficulty of it with an absolutely mine boggling story that is a heart wrenching all while having some of the best gameplay I’ve ever experience as well as showcasing just how amazing the DualSense is as a controller, makes Returnal easily one of the best games I’ve ever played.
It’s a shame that the games difficulty turns away so many players because it genuinely is an experience unlike any other.
If you’re a fan of Hades and Binding of Isaac, imagine a third person bullet hell version of that with intense horror elements. That’s what this game is and it hits every single note that it’s trying to achieve and expands on already existing ideas.
It takes the run based genre and goes with a heavy story that is gripping from the start. It may have some of the best atmospheric story telling in any game I’ve played. It matches the Souls series in every way. Subtle references lie in wait, alien dialect reveals the plot in strange ways.
The entire meaning of the game is so gorgeous and so impactful. I was left stunned by its ending.
It is hard to talk about this fantastic game without mentioning the controller and audio design.
I was always concerned the DuelSense would be a gimmick but Returnal proves it’s not. Every gun feels different. Every step I take, every bit of rain, every enemy attack feels and waves past the controller that immerses beyond just seeing what’s on the screen.
The audio as well, is just gorgeous. You honestly can tell where enemies are by the slight sound behind you with the 3D audio. It genuinely helped me in tight spots and every second matters in this game.
Returnal is honestly a fun, unique, extremely loveable game that sadly is turned away by it’s difficulty.
It deserves a round of a million applauses and has easily spiked itself up into my top PlayStation games of all time.
From the bottom of my run based heart.
Non lo platinerò mai per colpa di quei collezionabili del perus
peak ps5 arcade fun, one of the best on the platform
A beautiful way to punish yourself, I guess?
Honestly, I died too many times playing this game. Look, some people are into experiencing pain - I get it - but just give us soft ones a difficulty option! As it is, I made it to the second boss, almost beat it first time, and then, as I died due to my own clumsiness once again, said out loud, "Well, that's enough for me."
The game is wonderfully crafted and a joy to play (until you die). It looks exactly how it should, the control of the character is precisely what you'd expect and feels intuitive as well as exciting, the sound is flawless, and the DualSense magic is magical. The story, from what I could piece together, seems weird, maybe? The level design is pretty interesting for being a bunch of "rooms" that are sort of randomly connected together. Finding new weapons and alien tech was a decent addition, though the randomness of what you discover and therefore had available to use on each run could be annoying. There were definitely enough projectiles.
I think it needed a bit more of the roguelike feature where you unlock a powerful thing (like the yellow sword) and you get to use it in the next run. Every run feels too much like starting over instead of building on the last one. Really, the only thing that improves after a run is your brain and who wants that?
"Oh hey, what's this?" DEAD
Review from thedonproject.com
Honestly, I died too many times playing this game. Look, some people are into experiencing pain - I get it - but just give us soft ones a difficulty option! As it is, I made it to the second boss, almost beat it first time, and then, as I died due to my own clumsiness once again, said out loud, "Well, that's enough for me."
The game is wonderfully crafted and a joy to play (until you die). It looks exactly how it should, the control of the character is precisely what you'd expect and feels intuitive as well as exciting, the sound is flawless, and the DualSense magic is magical. The story, from what I could piece together, seems weird, maybe? The level design is pretty interesting for being a bunch of "rooms" that are sort of randomly connected together. Finding new weapons and alien tech was a decent addition, though the randomness of what you discover and therefore had available to use on each run could be annoying. There were definitely enough projectiles.
I think it needed a bit more of the roguelike feature where you unlock a powerful thing (like the yellow sword) and you get to use it in the next run. Every run feels too much like starting over instead of building on the last one. Really, the only thing that improves after a run is your brain and who wants that?
"Oh hey, what's this?" DEAD
Review from thedonproject.com
it ok.
Bonne DA, bonnes musiques et plaisant à jouer sans être trop punitif
easily my 2nd favorite rougelike, the gameplay is so fucking fun with all the upgrades you can get and with how fast things are going it gets CRAZY, must play if you're into rougelikes or have a ps5
[ATROPOS_SCOUT_LOG_#01]://“DualSense"
The drizzle of rain rippling through my fingers. Stone hearts pulsating, shocks to my system. A fog unending. This ain’t home but the place where I must be. The ghost of Sisyphus lost in a dark forest where the rivers run red with neon-blood at her feet.
This is not an ordinary planet. Everything wants [to kill] me. The worm-fed wolves and the speckled colossi uncoiling their endless garments of tentacles. Selene gets bashed into her suit by a biological blade slicing through the bullet rainbow. Azure echoes, a scan. Soft waves washing over my palms, producing new images, forming a sense of space built on the past-pulled directions of her previous deaths - rubber-banded triggers and reflexes snatching at the pressure of our fingers, dashes across a yard of grass, concealing its cosmic horrors, gestating new ones, each loot chamber a tomb filled with little dilemmas like a gun or another gun or a malignancy that’s worth the bite it will inflict on your virtual corpse once the creeper’s been fed if only I could survive that long - come through the other side of the mirror not unscathed but changed, finally, freed from the kind of anxious death-drive repetition forces upon you with its binaries of risk and reward. The sepulchral horror of Returnal’s feedback loop isn’t so much the impossibility of our escape as it is the unveiling of desire’s deepest seat; Selene - and by extension the player - are exactly where they’re meant to be, embedded within this unbelievably tight system of dashes and haptics, movement mechanics that thankfully prioritize responsiveness over groundedness complimented by an array of weapons each embodying distinct ways of approaching and eradicating our outer demons in this inner hell - and god does it feel good to burst this Hollowseeker open, watch Ixion fold into a cloud of golden dust; to see polygons devolve by my hand and understand this information in the skin directly then commits the player to kinesthesia as a form of immersion in which Returnal refuses subjugation and offers a direct line of conversation with the text instead - the best rumblescape since Rez’s Trance Vibrator. I’d go one step further even : Atropos as a sexual device. Of parasites latching onto my arm and skin saturated in power-ups. Digital matter that burrows in my brain's DualSense, carries me over this teleporter and away. Pop the bubble bath. Selene crumbles like the feeble being of particles that she is before reappearing somewhere else. Another room, another reverberation, this time I fail miserably at dispatching the heretic Phrike but I’ll soon be here again no doubt, and if not here then perhaps up in this spire that festers into infinity, grinding the score, collecting poppy flowers, attempting to make sense of the frenzy of it all. Bared tendrils at the mere sight of me, so I respond in kind - they tear me to pieces, they send me under.
Hihi, Atropos.
-
[ATROPOS SCOUT LOG_#02] :// “DreamSequence”
“Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”]”
- Chapter V, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Between every crash, a vision. Dreams in cathode ray-tubes and ocean-memories leaking through [her] with each failed attempt, a corrosive force of time itself, a marriage happening in reverse. Days falling into darkness; back to the beginning. In that particular fold of forest green a house stands - stood - still. Upon entrance, on the left wall just before a flight of stairs resonates with unknown footsteps, there hangs, I remark, the wooden-carved face of a sun left alone long ago. My son. Her daughter. Someone else’s Pandora's box - the soft voyeurism of play as metaphor. If DualSense’s intent was to obfuscate, to render tenuous and tactile the delineation between player and character then the house serves an opposite function - it sings with echoes, granting my poor astronaut the corporeal presence she so desperately craves in order to grasp the dream sequence and tear this body away from me. In her first-person perspective, at last, a new symbolic layer of reality touched in artifacts. Each passage through the house's pristine innards bores new holes in the narrative whilst grounding Selene in a larger picture of Returnal as an object both about her and itself - incapable of escaping its own maze of contradictions. But it's never enough. For me, for her. Even in death the proverbial rug is pulled from under us; to end her life on Earth means the same for Selene as it does on Atropos. We never escaped. And in this realization something shifts in our perception. Biomes of meaning begin to coalesce as crimson wastes become fractured and composed again, a ruin overgrown no longer and instead echoing our knowledge of design, confronting it to that of a decaying specter - except there's no one to race against but ourselves, frolicking in lasered flesh, taking a certain pleasure in charting that tract of scorched earth turned calcified snowmetal, in knowing that the planet glances back at us with every variation of its arcade terminologies. Sometimes on the ground you find a music box. Couple of omens, couple of tunes. Suddenly Returnal shrinks - and then expands. This planet is real, I’m convinced of it and the more Selene remembers, the more she seems to forget. I was lost in a forest once but now, it seems, I am trapped at the bottom.
Smile, Atropos.
-
Further journal entries will be added, in due time.
The drizzle of rain rippling through my fingers. Stone hearts pulsating, shocks to my system. A fog unending. This ain’t home but the place where I must be. The ghost of Sisyphus lost in a dark forest where the rivers run red with neon-blood at her feet.
This is not an ordinary planet. Everything wants [to kill] me. The worm-fed wolves and the speckled colossi uncoiling their endless garments of tentacles. Selene gets bashed into her suit by a biological blade slicing through the bullet rainbow. Azure echoes, a scan. Soft waves washing over my palms, producing new images, forming a sense of space built on the past-pulled directions of her previous deaths - rubber-banded triggers and reflexes snatching at the pressure of our fingers, dashes across a yard of grass, concealing its cosmic horrors, gestating new ones, each loot chamber a tomb filled with little dilemmas like a gun or another gun or a malignancy that’s worth the bite it will inflict on your virtual corpse once the creeper’s been fed if only I could survive that long - come through the other side of the mirror not unscathed but changed, finally, freed from the kind of anxious death-drive repetition forces upon you with its binaries of risk and reward. The sepulchral horror of Returnal’s feedback loop isn’t so much the impossibility of our escape as it is the unveiling of desire’s deepest seat; Selene - and by extension the player - are exactly where they’re meant to be, embedded within this unbelievably tight system of dashes and haptics, movement mechanics that thankfully prioritize responsiveness over groundedness complimented by an array of weapons each embodying distinct ways of approaching and eradicating our outer demons in this inner hell - and god does it feel good to burst this Hollowseeker open, watch Ixion fold into a cloud of golden dust; to see polygons devolve by my hand and understand this information in the skin directly then commits the player to kinesthesia as a form of immersion in which Returnal refuses subjugation and offers a direct line of conversation with the text instead - the best rumblescape since Rez’s Trance Vibrator. I’d go one step further even : Atropos as a sexual device. Of parasites latching onto my arm and skin saturated in power-ups. Digital matter that burrows in my brain's DualSense, carries me over this teleporter and away. Pop the bubble bath. Selene crumbles like the feeble being of particles that she is before reappearing somewhere else. Another room, another reverberation, this time I fail miserably at dispatching the heretic Phrike but I’ll soon be here again no doubt, and if not here then perhaps up in this spire that festers into infinity, grinding the score, collecting poppy flowers, attempting to make sense of the frenzy of it all. Bared tendrils at the mere sight of me, so I respond in kind - they tear me to pieces, they send me under.
Hihi, Atropos.
-
[ATROPOS SCOUT LOG_#02] :// “DreamSequence”
“Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”]”
- Chapter V, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Between every crash, a vision. Dreams in cathode ray-tubes and ocean-memories leaking through [her] with each failed attempt, a corrosive force of time itself, a marriage happening in reverse. Days falling into darkness; back to the beginning. In that particular fold of forest green a house stands - stood - still. Upon entrance, on the left wall just before a flight of stairs resonates with unknown footsteps, there hangs, I remark, the wooden-carved face of a sun left alone long ago. My son. Her daughter. Someone else’s Pandora's box - the soft voyeurism of play as metaphor. If DualSense’s intent was to obfuscate, to render tenuous and tactile the delineation between player and character then the house serves an opposite function - it sings with echoes, granting my poor astronaut the corporeal presence she so desperately craves in order to grasp the dream sequence and tear this body away from me. In her first-person perspective, at last, a new symbolic layer of reality touched in artifacts. Each passage through the house's pristine innards bores new holes in the narrative whilst grounding Selene in a larger picture of Returnal as an object both about her and itself - incapable of escaping its own maze of contradictions. But it's never enough. For me, for her. Even in death the proverbial rug is pulled from under us; to end her life on Earth means the same for Selene as it does on Atropos. We never escaped. And in this realization something shifts in our perception. Biomes of meaning begin to coalesce as crimson wastes become fractured and composed again, a ruin overgrown no longer and instead echoing our knowledge of design, confronting it to that of a decaying specter - except there's no one to race against but ourselves, frolicking in lasered flesh, taking a certain pleasure in charting that tract of scorched earth turned calcified snowmetal, in knowing that the planet glances back at us with every variation of its arcade terminologies. Sometimes on the ground you find a music box. Couple of omens, couple of tunes. Suddenly Returnal shrinks - and then expands. This planet is real, I’m convinced of it and the more Selene remembers, the more she seems to forget. I was lost in a forest once but now, it seems, I am trapped at the bottom.
Smile, Atropos.
-
Further journal entries will be added, in due time.
Don’t fear the reaper 💀
I enjoyed it so much the first time I made a whole new PSN account just to platinum and 100% it again. In other news: the RNG still sucks.
El primer roguelike AAA, tiene los soundtrack, tiene los grafix, y tiene el gameplay! le falta uno o dos bosses más, pero igual muy bueno, y muy infravalorado
Crazy game, not so crazy on the story
Como meu primeiro rogue-like, eu amei demais esse jogo. Mesmo que meio frustrante ás vezes, sempre ficava instigado a iniciar um novo ciclo. Os chefões e inimigos no geral são LINDÍSSIMOS, e os efeitos de partícula são um dos mais bonitos que eu já vi. Fora que é um dos poucos jogos que realmente usam as funções do DualSense. Recomendo muito, apesar de ser difícil de platinar
I do not think this game is as hard as some people are making it out to be, it is just very unforgiving when you die. Like if there was saves right before the boss fights then people would die maybe a couple times but then beat, like they are not actually that difficult. It is just the loss of so much progress that makes it "difficult". Anyway, it is a very fun game. peaked at the Nemesis boss fight tho
In my opinion, This game does a lot of things extremely well but being a good rogue-like is DEFINITELY not one them.
Imma be completely honest: I didn't beat this game legitly. For the last 2 bosses I save scummed hard (But I genuinely did first try the final boss! I swear! Well the "final boss" for act 2).
This game is WAY too hard for me. I thought the boss run backs in Dark Souls were mean, this shit is next level. The first time I tried this game I was so pissed off when I learned how harsh it is when you die. I hated it, deleted it and said fuck it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. I loved the gameplay and had fun playing it. I even looked up tips on how to get better. The bosses are so cool and their attacks are pretty.
It's a great game and I respect the hell out of it. It's just extremely hard and unforgiving and I couldn't beat it legitly without going insane. The enemy spam go crazy.
This game is WAY too hard for me. I thought the boss run backs in Dark Souls were mean, this shit is next level. The first time I tried this game I was so pissed off when I learned how harsh it is when you die. I hated it, deleted it and said fuck it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. I loved the gameplay and had fun playing it. I even looked up tips on how to get better. The bosses are so cool and their attacks are pretty.
It's a great game and I respect the hell out of it. It's just extremely hard and unforgiving and I couldn't beat it legitly without going insane. The enemy spam go crazy.
Uma ideia interessante, mas pecou bastante na repetitividade e no design dos inimigos
Sfiancante. Affascinante.
mad respect for housemarque and for sony for letting them see this demanding vision through, but the friction is just a bit too high for me here.
Rogue Like :P
Não tive coragem de platinar mas o loop de gameplay e quase legal
Não tive coragem de platinar mas o loop de gameplay e quase legal
I began Returnal with the slightest of ideas of what kind of game I was getting myself into. From there, I learned that this game is unlike anything else I've ever tried.
Not only is this game one of the highest points of a roguelike I've ever had the pleasure of enjoying, but every aspect of this game will twist into bringing you down into its world. Perfect sound design, perfect gameplay, perfect story, perfect visuals. My biggest gripe is that I want more.
Not only is this game one of the highest points of a roguelike I've ever had the pleasure of enjoying, but every aspect of this game will twist into bringing you down into its world. Perfect sound design, perfect gameplay, perfect story, perfect visuals. My biggest gripe is that I want more.
Uma história intrigante demais e uma gameplay extremamente divertida. Não sou muito fã em jogos roguelike, mas realmente gostei de Returnal.Não apenas da jogabilidade, mas também da lore, é legal ver diferentes tipos de inimigos dependendo do bioma. Um jogo roguelike realmente bom, é difícil, mas não tão difícil. Eu poderia dizer que é como um jogo estilo souls é dificil porem quando se pega o ritmo já era, realmente recomendo este jogo, se você gosta de um jogo desafiador com uma boa lore, boa jogabilidade e uma boa história, este é o jogo. Os gráficos são bons e a atmosfera é incrível. Vale dizer que este não é um jogo para todos, assim como qualquer game souls ou roguelike, mas como eu disse, se você gosta de um jogo desafiador, este é um desses jogos.
Pontos Positivos:
- Combate
- Elementos de roguelike bem diferentes dos demais
- Narrativa muito bem contada
Pontos Negativos:
- NA
Versão utilizada para análise: PC
Pontos Positivos:
- Combate
- Elementos de roguelike bem diferentes dos demais
- Narrativa muito bem contada
Pontos Negativos:
- NA
Versão utilizada para análise: PC
brave enough to admit I don't understand anything that's going on in the story
A game of soaring highs and absolutely soul-crushing lows. Some runs genuinely just feel insanely unfair due to just being fucked by the games RNG over and over again. There's only so much skill I can have before me winning or losing feels completely out of my hands. I really love how this game feels to play, the music is fantastic and I like the strange cosmic imagery, but I've been trying to hit credits since on and off this came out and I've never managed it. I came SO close this time but, admittedly, fucked it up. The story isn't really hitting for me either, I like an abstract vibes-based narrative but this is so obtuse that it almost comes off as obnoxious. After like 20 hours, Selene constantly spouting bizarre gibberish in logs just gets a little grating. ALSO, and maybe this contributed a fair bit to me dropping this again, but the PC port of this is pretty terrible. Constant microstuttering in a fast-paced game is so god damn annoying (and kinda nauseating), and I've had a couple of game breaking bugs that have seemingly just never been patched out.
Oh well. I will probably once again come back to this and try (and most likely fail) to beat it at some point in the future, but I've gotten almost right to the end and the story isn't enough for me to want to keep going through it all again.
Oh well. I will probably once again come back to this and try (and most likely fail) to beat it at some point in the future, but I've gotten almost right to the end and the story isn't enough for me to want to keep going through it all again.
ooo hell yeah great stuff in here
i think im a monkey because i didnt pay a single bit of attention to the story in this game, but the gameplay made me feel good. solid game.
amo a gameplay caotica desse mas achei ele bem cansativo
It's not often that I get hooked on a roguelike for the story, normally I get invested for the mechanics. Returnal is one of the few cases where both are so intriguing that I can't help but want to keep playing, which is an incredible feat given that a standard loop will take upwards of an hour.
Unraveling the mystery of Atropos, and Selene herself, is such a driving force that even when I wasn't playing the game I was thinking about it, theorising what there is to find, piecing together clues from Audio Logs and Xenoglyphs, and it finds a happy middle ground of giving you just enough to connect dots, but not enough to see the full picture.
It's important to note as well that the moment-to-moment gameplay is incredibly satisfying, so that when there are lulls in the story it doesn't matter as much because its still just a blast playing it. Admittedly a couple of the bosses (or at least the paths getting to them when you loop), are difficult for difficulties sake, and feel like they're there just to hold you back and extend game time, especially at the half-way mark. But when you get a good loop, with great gear, and you're riding that wave of Level 5 Adrenaline, it feels like an utter dream.
Returnal really is one of the best showcase of the PS5 so far, utilising it's SSD, GPU, and the amazing DualSense, to create a title that's up there with God of War and Spiderman in terms of Sony's first-party quality
Unraveling the mystery of Atropos, and Selene herself, is such a driving force that even when I wasn't playing the game I was thinking about it, theorising what there is to find, piecing together clues from Audio Logs and Xenoglyphs, and it finds a happy middle ground of giving you just enough to connect dots, but not enough to see the full picture.
It's important to note as well that the moment-to-moment gameplay is incredibly satisfying, so that when there are lulls in the story it doesn't matter as much because its still just a blast playing it. Admittedly a couple of the bosses (or at least the paths getting to them when you loop), are difficult for difficulties sake, and feel like they're there just to hold you back and extend game time, especially at the half-way mark. But when you get a good loop, with great gear, and you're riding that wave of Level 5 Adrenaline, it feels like an utter dream.
Returnal really is one of the best showcase of the PS5 so far, utilising it's SSD, GPU, and the amazing DualSense, to create a title that's up there with God of War and Spiderman in terms of Sony's first-party quality