Returnal

My first conscious encounter with a roguelike was the Wii remake of Baroque, a moody dungeon crawler whose engrossing weirdness was matched only by its arse backwards design and psychotic difficulty. I still think of it fondly despite playing maybe 2 hours total of the stupid thing. I’ve never been a big fan of roguelikes yet there are those that do occasionally lure me in. Alas, Baroque tried to do this by going in for a kiss only to puke on my favourite dress. The Binding of Isaac, Hades, for as great as they are, it was Finnish developer Housemarque’s Returnal which truly swept me off my feet. Turns out the way to this woman’s heart is with chocolates, a 25% integrity upgrade and a level 30 Rotgland Lobber.

It also helps when your game has an atmosphere that is equal parts Metroid and Dark Souls, not to mention combat that’s a balletic fusion of bullet hell and retro shooter carnage. It’s almost what Metroid: Other M might have been in some other divine, utopian paradise.

You play as Selene, a sort of intergalactic explorer for an organisation called Astra. You head off, in apparent violation of protocol, to investigate a signal designated ‘White Shadow’ on the planet of Atropos. Whilst approaching the planet your ship Helios is struck by lightning and crash lands in a darkened forest some distance from the signal. Waking from the crash to see her ship crippled, Selene sets off alone to hunt down this mysterious signal.

At least that’s the setup, the game very quickly lets slip that things aren’t all that they seem, such as when Selene wakes up back by the ship when one of the planet’s hostile lifeforms decides to make party streamers out of her intestines. Again and again she dies, but no oblivion is forthcoming, just a return to the initial crash and a fresh desire to escape this seemingly endless cycle.

Much of the narrative is quite cryptic, with a heavy reliance on audio logs from Selene herself, recorded by what appears to be other iterations of her. Whatever one ultimately makes of the story and its inevitable twist, it kept me intrigued throughout, largely thanks to the excellent voice acting and visual design for the world itself.

Being on Atropos is a compelling experience with its mix of atmospheric biomes, secret pathways and sheer sublimity. Claustrophobic darkness gives way to vast landscapes and colossal structures that speak of some ancient tragedy. It all feels genuinely alien, with a rundown, lived in quality that helps immerse you in it. You find strange glyphs of alien origin and translating them leads to more and more intrigue as to what the hell is going on.

As might be implied, exploration plays a big part in Returnal. Not just for finding out more about the narrative, but for the sake of survival. With every death, you lose everything; your weapon, your upgrades, health boosts etc., everything but for a few permanent suit upgrades and your ether, a persistent currency that helps you access some of the alien technology and cleanse otherwise potentially harmful items.

Coupled with a steady learning curve, it becomes essential to eke out every advantage you can. As with other roguelikes you have to balance a number of factors as many items offer both benefits and liabilities. Various chests, items and upgrades carry a risk of suit malfunctions which inhibit you in some way. Most can be cleared by completing a specific task or action, but suffer too many and you can become stuck with one. Alien parasites offer their own boosts and buffs but in turn require a loss elsewhere. It’s a risk and reward system that benefits the forward thinker as acquiring and combining items in the right way can lead to effective builds and successful runs.

It’s not original, but it is elegant and well implemented. More and more items are unlocked as you go and the ever expanding arsenal helps to give more variety the further and further you progress. All of which ultimately serving the main attraction, the combat.

One of Returnal’s great strengths is in its ability to make you feel at once powerful and vulnerable. But for the handful of bosses, everything, Selene included, are essentially glass cannons. You hurt, they hurt, death is kept busy.

It all starts off relatively sane, with you shooting away from behind cover to preserve your meagre health, but very soon enemies are hounding you mercilessly and getting the fuck out of Dodge becomes standard. Returnal moves, and in short order you’re hopping around like a lunatic as you jockey for a good position to return fire.

Add to this shielded enemies you need to melee to damage and expose and you get chaos, fabulous, brutal chaos. The anxious thrill of battle is intoxicating with each despatched enemy and last minute evasion drip feeding the body with dopamine until it’s practically drowning in it.

Crucial to this is the game’s controls and movement which are buttery smooth. Loading times are minimal and the frame rate holds pretty well where the running and jumping all feel responsive and tight. Getting caught out by the scenery can be a pain at times, but being aware of one’s surroundings is but another aspect of learning to survive. When you make a difficult game, it’s vital that you’re not also having to fight the controls as well the enemies and Returnal happily makes the simple act of motion something joyful and fun.

The other key aspect is the enemy behaviour. Returnal’s chaos is chaos controlled, and largely avoids the pitfall of making the on screen action so fast and frantic that it loses any sense of clarity as to what’s actually going on. Housemaque’s experience with bullet hell shooters comes to the fore here where everything is very deliberate and precise, so whilst there is a lot going at times, there is very much a method and structure behind everything, where I rarely felt as though anything was particularly unfair. In any given encounter you have the tools to survive and endure, it’s mostly a question of learning and developing strategies to do so.

The few bosses that are in the game personify this, as they are the most overt in their bullet hell design, requiring you to understand their attack patterns and the correct set of moves needed to avoid them. These sections also highlight how well made the jump to 3D has been, where the added dimension creates no loss in control and all feels very natural and intuitive despite the challenge or difficulty.

All of which leaves me unfathomably giddy; like Bayonetta, it turns combat into something of a dance where the rhythm of battle just feels right and immensely satisfying to be a part of. Chain enemy kills without being hit and the game ratchets things up further with a series of mini-buffs, and with everything else layered on top I find little to complain about, but for wishing there was more of it to discover.

Returnal isn’t ground-breaking, but rather it is a successful conjunction of a number of great design and aesthetic choices. It wields its roguelike aspects with smarts, integrating its mechanics neatly into a beautifully grim world and as a result becomes precisely the sum of its glorious parts. A Frankenstein’s monster with beauty, brains and bountiful brutality.