The use of quiet and echoed sound, robotic honks or gurgled growls through smog and forest, alien life that's dormant, but very much waiting to come alive (and subsequently pull you apart). It's the fog, the swirls of sand, the thick, polluted haze, the retro-future menus and computers - Returnal is always partially obscured, hard to read, half-intelligible. It's also the mastery of the other things, the miscellaneous: the sounds of it, the squelching, dripping, gurning noise of the world that tells you it's rotten, putrid, old. (Which makes sense: Returnal shares talent with Remedy in narrative designers like Gregory Louden and Eevi Korhonen, and what talent they are).īut again, this is really the beginning of what counts for story. It's very Remedy, if we're doing references again - disquiet and implied horror, but never overt. There's a spooky house you visit along the way (where suddenly you're in first-person), there are audio logs of past and future dead Selenes, suffering varying levels of madness (there's a Dark Souls-y element to this: some found bodies mirror the deaths of other players, whom you can choose to "salvage" for resources or "avenge" with a mini boss fight) and there are xeno-archives to tour and xeno-runes to collect that offer varying dollops of a kind of space-Greek mythology. This becomes her God of the Gaps, the thing that answers what science can't: why, for instance, each time Selene dies she wakes up, back at her crashed ship, back at the beginning of the trail, the end of which she assumes must be at that white shadow. For the horror-averse, the spooky house is all atmosphere, don't worry about overt P.T.-style horror coming into things. She's chasing the "white shadow", a signal broadcast from somewhere on the planet that she is guided to, or lured toward, by the vision of a 20th century astronaut. Through her lens the world is all flora and fauna, but gradually that lens is smashed. ![]() Selene is voiced with stern perfection by Jane Perry, (with likeness from Anne Beyer): cold, assertive, a scouting warrior-scientist who's first reaction is to catalogue and enquire, to talk to the monsters before shooting them to bits. The execution is through everything the game has. The setup is you, Selene, crash on a deeply hostile planet called Atropos for an unknown reason, seemingly defying an order. And I say story in the widest possible terms, because Returnal's a rare case of a game that understands the unmatched breadth of what a game's story can be. ![]() Returnal's story - which I should warn you I haven't finished and probably never will, but more on that later - is fantastic, at least so far. Pick your poison - Returnal stocks everything and almost everything is sublime. It picks from Ridley Scott, Eugene Jarvis, Hidetaka Miyazaki, H.R. And it's a third-person shooter, obviously. But it's also a metroidvania, handing out new abilities after boss kills which open up new paths. It's a roguelite, insofar as death returns you to the start and the dungeonlike world procedurally changes with each run through it. Returnal's is vast - it wants to be everything. It's their first "triple-A" one though, and with big budget comes big scope. Returnal is the latest from Housemarque, the Finnish team behind masterly arcade-style shoot-em-ups like Resogun, twin-stick shooters like Dead Nation and Alienation, and the superlative Nex Machina. The history is going to be important here, if we're going to pull all of this apart.
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