‘Returnal’ is an Unrelenting Fever Dream
Ben recommends listening to Returnal’s original soundtrack, scored by Bobby Krlic, while reading.
Returnal is an unrelenting fever dream. There were moments where putting the controller down felt like letting the monster under my bed rest unstirred for another night. Returnal constantly poked at my own morbid curiosity, beckoning me forward with mystifying world design and precise combat. I didn’t want to see what was around the corner, I needed to see what was around the corner. As such, Returnal’s roguelike mechanics make for an all too familiar experience: a nightmare you never quite get to see the end of – waking up right on the precipice of the next big discovery.
Dying in Returnal is as much a part of the game as surviving. Fundamentally, the game structures its narrative and gameplay design around the concept of living, dying, and returning to square one. With the exception of a few new shortcuts and abilities, every death sends you right back to where you came from: a jarring aircraft crash that leaves Selene, the game’s protagonist, right back at the start of the mysterious labyrinth of Atropos – an off-limits planet with seemingly infinite dangers. It can feel exhausting, as attempts often ran several hours long for me only to die in a way that felt abrupt. But with each failed excursion, I learned a little bit more about Atropos and Selene. Returnal beckoned me forward, even when it sent me back.
Most intriguing to me were the alien ruins of Atropos – often damaged or eroding, but always impressive in scale. Juxtaposed with the intensely hued projectiles and color scheme of everything else in Returnal, there is an esoteric beauty to Atropos. Returnal uses audio and text logs to worldbuild, but it’s far more efficient at using visual language to tell Selene’s story of haunting regret. The world of Atropos feels real, but its design feels like a visual representation of trauma, guilt, and the horror that comes with each.
The combat in Returnal is precise and gratifying. There are dozens of different enemy types, all of which have unique characteristics that help outline the world they inhabit and make for frightening encounters. The most common enemy in the earlier biomes is the “Kerberon,” a lizard-like foe with tentacle limbs extending from its head. The Kerberon’s shoot a horizontal flare of blue orbs at you, just slow enough that you can jump over or dash through them. The color of the orb indicates exactly how you can navigate them. For instance, blue orbs can be dashed through, but purple orbs or lasers cut deep unless you avoid them altogether.
The combat really shines once you get ahold of some of the game’s earlier abilities — like the Atropian Blade that allows for precise melee swings that knock out a chunk of enemy health and frequently stuns them. Everything moves quickly and hits pretty hard, so I found that the game actually got easier as I mastered it — in spite of the enemies and terrain becoming more difficult to navigate.
What stood out to me the most are the game’s colossal boss enemies. Not only do the bosses have visual designs that stand up to the likes of Bloodborne, the sound design and sense of scale for each is tremendous. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but a specific organ-playing midgame boss encomposses everything I love about Returnal: it’s mysterious, horrifying, and demanding of mastery all at once. Depending on how well equipped I was, each boss provided an immense challenge. Some of them lasted upwards of ten or so minutes and their attacks drained enough health that sometimes it only took five or six hits before Selene was sent back to the start of the game. Luckily, defeating each boss unlocks a shortcut to the next level should you want to skip fighting them again in the future.
Returnal’s challenge is both its greatest asset and biggest frustration. There is no save feature available, which means relying on the Playstation 5’s rest mode to resume runs without being reset to the beginning. I had at least two instances of my Playstation 5 crashing and not retaining my progress. While Returnal was good enough for me to not really care, it makes a game that is arguably not very accessible even less-so for those that struggle to play games multiple hours in a row. When a run does eventually click, however, it’s intensely satisfying.
I have been trying to focus more on the way that games make me feel, rather than the nuts and bolts of how they function. Returnal makes me feel like that diner scene in Mulholland Drive where a man describes a recurring nightmare he has. In the nightmare, he visits a diner and sees a horrifying man that scares the shit out of him. So what does he do? He visits the diner, replays the scene just as it happens in his nightmare. Because sometimes you just have to know. Returnal is that kind of experience for me. Sometimes frustrating, always adrenaline fueled. I just couldn’t stop until I saw it all the way through.
Surely the kind of experience that Returnal offers won’t be for everyone, and even as I type that out it sounds ridiculous: after all, no game is made for everyone. But Returnal in particular evokes a feeling that I needed to be in the right kind of headspace for. It is brutally challenging and the lack of saves feels like an unfair condition to add on top of that. And yet, I can’t remember the last time a game sucked me in the way that Returnal did. The kind of catharsis that accompanied beating it felt so familiar and relieving, like waking up and realizing that the nightmare wasn’t real.
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