Returnal somehow still stands in 2023 as one of very few genuinely current-gen-native video games, and you can tell. The graphics are slick, full of shaders, particles, and lighting that underscores its otherworldly vibe. It takes full advantage of the DualSense's haptics to make the game as tactile as it is visual—the half-trigger alt fire mode is particularly impressive in its fluidity of adding what's effectively an extra virtual button to the controller.

My problem is simply that I don't like shooters all that much. All the genuinely challenging fights in this game put a lot of weight onto the player's skill at shooting while dodging and weaving, and I'm neither great at that nor particularly interested in it. In some games, the roguelike design would help compensate for this by giving me the opportunity to assemble a synergy build that can simply overpower enemies despite my middling skill, but that's not Returnal: the build customization here doesn't have the multiplicative scaling necessary to really tap into that mode of play.

So I made it to the final boss of the second biome, died with the last shred of its health remaining, and will probably never return to this game.