And your character dies over and over in sometimes lightly horrific ways. Some areas feature stacks of desiccated corpses. There are explosions, cries of pain and splashes of blood. The air is often filled with hundreds of swirling and blazing blasts that you must maneuver around while trying to hit foes with attacks of your own. And the combat can be incredibly frenetic, too. Gamers use rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers against sharp-clawed and sharp-toothed beasties of all sizes, as well as alien humanoids and robotic sentries. Content ConcernsĪlong with the mental gymnastics side of play, gameplay here definitely emphasizes a lot of shooting. And all of those story challenges give gamers something to grapple with mentally as they strive to overcome physical obstacles in their path. There are layers upon layers of almost dream-like situations to make your way through. One of the very interesting aspects of this game is that Selene must explore aspects of her own past while she tries to piece together the mystery of the planet’s ancient society and the ever-repeating cycle in the present. As gamers make progress, certain tools give them the ability to grapple to higher areas, travel under water, teleport short distances, etc. Though procedurally generated, in some respects, there are also familiar repetitions that pop up in the mix and that open the door to discovering hidden powerups, improved weapons and vital tools in hard-to-find places. Those new takes slowly reveal the puzzle behind the ancient world she’s been sucked into.
The idea behind the game is that each pass reveals new bits of information and adds pieces to Selene’s ever-growing story. The world around her is tweaked and shifted slightly, while new story elements and alien foes are scattered around the expansive, explorable Biomes. Upon dying, the astronaut gets pulled back to the moments leading up to her initial crash all over again.
It makes a little more sense, however, after Selene’s inevitable first death. And as she listens to left-behind spacelogs, she learns that she’s repeated this adventure before, even though she remembers nothing of it. Selene finds her own spacesuit-clad corpse, crumpled in an open field. She sets out to explore, only to make a discomforting discovery: herself. Gamers play as Selene, an astronaut who finds herself stranded on a strange planet after crashing her small, single-pilot spacecraft. For others, it will feel more like a frustrating, ever-repeating fever-dream. And the game expects you to figure out what’s going on.įor some, those elements will yield a unique-feeling, graphically stimulating and haunted-gaming tapestry. It’s something of a randomly generated, third-person shooter, psychological horror title that keeps sending you back to the same starting point while it reshuffles the visual deck. Returnal is a very difficult game to describe.
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