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. Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment.Watch on YouTube Aoife's let's play of Returnal's brilliant first hour. Euphoric, even! It's in its interest and my own for it to just let me play it, but Returnal is a video game that does not want to be played. It hides its best moments, buries them, beneath repetition and frustration and a byzantine UI, but those moments are just extraordinary. I'm saying this because Returnal is good - it's so good! - but it is incredibly reluctant to let you find that out. But pinned it down I have: Returnal has the personality of a furious cat with a sore tooth, and it's your job to be its vet. Think about it and you'll find games will happily fall into their roles - courthouse jester, self-serious actor, cerebral engineer (I'm not going to say which is which). Sometimes, when you talk about games, it helps to think about their personalities: what do they want from you? How do they behave? What role do you play in the relationship here, and what do they think of you in return? Normally this is quite easy. The Team Asobi section says, "The team behind the PS5 exclusive Astro's Playroom", whilst the Bend Studio part of the site says, "Creating games for over 25 years at the base of Oregon’s beautiful Cascade Mountains." This makes it more likely that Sony does truly consider Returnal to be a "mega-hit".In Returnal, Housemarque builds a game on both euphoric highs and confounding lows. Even though those stats are cumulative between the player base, it still shows that a good number of people played Returnal.Īlthough, as mentioned above, the term "mega-hit" could just be marketing terms to try and push Returnal's success, it's interesting to note that the page doesn't always use such descriptors for games listed on the page. Those stats revealed that there were over 5 million hours put into the game, and 9 million player deaths total. Interestingly, no sales figures were ever officially given for Returnal, and the only data we have comes from stats released by the developer. The reaction from players was similarly positive sitting at a 7.2 on Metacritic, although perhaps less unanimous due to the game's high difficulty and $70 price point at launch. Returnal received some pretty glowing reviews when it launched and currently sits at an 85 on Metacritic. It's not clear whether Sony is referring to Returnal's critical reception or its sales figures here, but it seems likely that it's a mixture of both factors.
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