Returnal

Developer Housemarque Publisher SIE Format PS5 Release Out now

PS5

We die, and our next run begins before our body’s hit the floor. Returnal is, in many senses, the first truly next-gen game on PS5: its production values are off the scale, its use of the DualSense is remarkable, and in its best moments it is like nothing we’ve seen or played. But PS5’s SSD might just be Returnal’s star, making an already compulsive game even harder to put down by throwing you back into the action in seconds. Ultrafast storage isn’t just a hardware feature, it’s a design tool in its own right.

Returnal is at its best when played at similarly high speed. There are times when the screen is filled with deadly enemy ordnance, you’re low on health and out of restoratives, and all you have left is your own skill. On instinct alone, you weave in and out of the hail of fire. You zip around the level like a sci-fi action god, not standing still until you’ve somehow cleared the room without taking a scratch.

The two keys to this are your movement and your arsenal. Returnal keeps the former simple: a floaty jump, a dash with generous invincibility, and a powerful melee sword swing, with Metroid-like traversal abilities folded in as you progress. The weapons, however, are a marvel. Powered by a Gears-style active reload, they drop with perk-like Traits, and a powerful alt-fire mode governed by a long cooldown. They have evocative sci-fi names (Rotgland Lobber is a particular favourite), are built for spectacle, and balanced such that you feel capable, but never game-breakingly so. Early on, weapons drop with a single Trait, but by game’s end they come with four, and the stacked effects can be thrillingly absurd.

Enemies are similarly tooled up, as you’d expect from Housemarque, a studio that’s hung a fair few bullet curtains down the years. Some issue great patterned volleys of globular ordnance, like bosses borrowed from Cave and rendered as grunts in glorious, bleeding-edge 3D. They fire lasers and AOE status effects; they fly in for melee attacks, and kamikaze-charge you at low health. Silhouettes are discrete and immediately recognisable, but some variants are granted multiple movesets to keep you on your toes. And the bosses are simply spectacular, an array of beautiful multi-phase odysseys that ramp up the bullet-hell insanity to what feels like the maximum, then just keep on going.

Combat is a delight, then, and that’s just as well – not only because you’ll see a lot of it, but also because of the awkward bits that surround it. Returnal posits itself a Roguelike: failure is assumed. Yet Housemarque doesn’t merely expect you to die, it revels in the prospect. For all the combat’s frantic pace, at every turn its designers appear keen to slow you down.

Returnal’s real difficulty comes not from its action, but its structure. Die, and you’re dumped right back at the start (though what constitutes the ‘start’ changes later). There are shortcuts, after a fashion: kill the first boss, and the key it drops opens a portal to the second level for good. But the algorithm that shuffles the level’s layout is only too eager to deal you a bum hand, setting the room you’re looking for beyond a gauntlet of punishing encounters. You can run through most of them, but doing so will most likely leave you underpowered for the fight you’re headed for. Take it slow and you’ll hopefully emerge stronger for it, but when you’ve spent an hour fighting through three stages to die to a boss in three minutes a few times, you may resent the repetition.

Its approach to loot is similarly stern. Artifacts afford passive skills, but most effects are slender – a tenper-cent stat boost, a two-second cooldown reduction – and often priced out of reach. Equippable Parasites offer similar buffs, but also come with a random debuff, and rare is the parasite whose positive effect outweighs its drawback. Then there’s Malignancy, an effect that curses certain chests and pickups with the chance of a powerful debuff. Dubbed Malfunctions, these can only be removed by completing a certain objective: kill 20 enemies, say, or open two chests. The debuffs can be run-killingly strong, but clearing them is, like so much else, a question of good fortune. You are not going to kill 20 enemies in a single-target boss fight. You cannot open chests if the game will not spawn them – and if you open another Malignant chest, you risk making a bad situation worse.

Among all that is precious little in the way of synergy, in ways to make guns, passives and pickups combine into unique, all-powerful character builds. With little persistence between runs – progression is largely a question of actual progress, with story beats and new abilities effectively gated off behind boss rooms – you can put hours in without feeling like you’ve got anywhere at all. As a shooter, Returnal excels. As a Roguelike, it stumbles.

This may be an error of marketing and positioning, rather than one of design. Think of Returnal as another Housemarque arcade game, and it is suddenly cast in more flattering light. Of course you go back to the start when you die, and have to fight all the way back for another crack at a boss. Think of its loot, structure and story as remedies for monotony, rather than the heart of the game – as ways to make each run feel different, rather than define it – and it all starts to make sense.

All that adds up to a strange old thing. Returnal is by turns a gloriously dynamic action game and a dark slice of psychological horror. It is an indie curio with a blockbuster budget; a game built to punish the masses to whom it is being marketed, that alternately baffles, enthrals and seems to hate you. It calls itself a Roguelike, but in fact represents a generational leap for a style of game that its own developer famously said was finished just a few years ago. No, arcade games never died. Turns out they were just respawning.

The bosses are spectacular, an array of beautiful multiphase odysseys that ramp up the bullet-hell insanity