You are Selene and you are an astronaut. Your spaceship plunges into flames on a dark and brutal exoplanet infested with hostile life forms.
Every time you die you come back to do it all over again but in a slightly different way. You find yourself trapped inside a nightmare that you could have dreamed of after seeing Alien. You just can’t wake up.
Let’s talk about Returnal, perhaps the first real exclusive for Ps5, developed by the Finns of Housemarque, already known for Super Stardust and Resogun. We are in a roguellike with a scientific setting that is different from the others, however. Every time you die, you go back to the crash site, the planet has procedurally reshuffled itself, it’s the same place but always a little different. Each time you explore, you learn a little more about the planet and the astronaut, as well as the rules of the game. In short, every time that happens and often happens to die you understand more of what is happening.
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What we liked
The experience is punitive but there is really worse in the playful landscape. The gameplay is frenetic: run, jump, dodge and shoot like in the most classic hellish shooter. But first of all Returnal is finally a game of the new generation. You see it in the lightning-fast loading times, in the dynamic lighting but most of all you feel it.
The use of sound and the DualSense controller make this game a different experience from the others. Testing with Sony’s Pulse 3D headphones helps to understand the deep work on sound in three dimensions. The alien beasts announce themselves to the touch, the planet breathes and transforms itself. A lot more things happen on the screen than you see and hear them with your hearing and with the controller in your hand. The effect is truly amazing.
What we didn’t like
More than the game, the pricing policy perplexes us. Returnal costs 80 euros. But you can also find it online for 70 euros. And there are those who bet – the game came out on April 30 – that the discounts will arrive very soon. It is not clear, but the problem is not just Playstation, what the video game must cost in the pandemic era. There is a claim that this would have been a great product to put on a subscription offer (which Sony doesn’t believe in). Those who perhaps wait to buy it waiting for a price drop. The quality of the game is unquestionable, if anything, the pricing policy of the large videogame platforms is perplexing. Both on supply and demand. So both for those who have to decide if and when to buy and for those who have to plan new titles perhaps waiting to have numbers on the sales front.
The judgment
We are facing a difficult game, at times punitive, as you will have understood. You love it and you hate it but you always want to go back in there anyway. Because every time you leave you discover something more. But above all because a world so dark and alive on Playstation had never been seen before.