īut behind the game’s realistic graphics and terrifying atmosphere, Returnal hides a gaming experience that still unmistakably has Housemarque DNA. Don’t get me wrong, games like Super Stardust, Resogun, and Nex Machina have their own irrepressible wealth of style, charm, and elegance, but you’d think the road from a colorful blast orgy to a hellish space spiral would be much longer. Hoping not to take away or oversimplify the developer’s previous work, it seems fair to say that Finnish developer Housemarque has achieved this by building beautified, bubbling, and visually maximizing interpretations of classic blaster games like Space Invaders and Asteroids. It’s a testament to the developer’s balance and moderation that the game’s otherwise disparate and even conflicting elements actually come together to create the intended mix of thrills and action.Īnd Returnal will only think of who is really behind it hands and become even more impressive. While much of the game’s time is spent in heavy and intense third-person action and carefully navigating through the maze-like level mods, there are some contrasting moments where Returnal plunges into deep water in sheer horror. It’s a grim, terrifying, irresistibly morbid tale in every sense of the word Returnal delivers, successfully tapping into the cyclical underpinnings that underpin so many games, and managing to navigate through existential turmoil, unsolved mysteries, pitch-black A mixture of atmospheric atmosphere and sporadic horror to pique curiosity quickly and consistently. Unresolved memories from the past also start to creep in, as the mesmerizing circular motion of time forms a downward spiral, hellishly toward the center of madness. Whether out of necessity, compulsion, or otherwise, the planet itself-or some sinister force obsessed with its dark interior-seems to keep Selene locked in a relentless cycle of death and forced rebirth. Every time she dies-and she dies often, because the dangers aboard the murky Atropos are many-she wakes up in the same place, next to the wreckage of the spaceship she arrived at. Still, you’ll have to work hard to find video games that welcome the cursed circular motion to the same degree as the bleak and psychologically intricate Returnal.The title is, if you tense a nerve cell or two, you might feel, eternity and returncontraction of the two words, and eternity Repeat and prisonThe reminder or threat of an unbreakable loop of time sets the stage for the epic Sisyphus tragedy from the very beginning.įor missing astronaut Selene, things are actually going in circles. This observation is nothing new, and several games have attempted italics or meditation, with varying success, to characterize so much of the gaming experience. From the microprocessor circuits that enable them to exist, to the abstract loop of player activity – the game loop – we retroactively try to divide them into many things in the game world – such as the wheels on a bus, or the CD – round and round and round and round. In the blink of an eye, hidden, forgotten or squeezed gaming experiences are recreated, restored or simply republished on new machines – old wine in a new bag, if you will.Īfter all, computer games have some basic loops. Politicians who failed yesterday are re-elected tomorrow, and celebrities who fail are resurrected from the mists of oblivion - only to return to them immediately. The seasons change and so do the holidays. We live it forward, we understand it backwards, and at the same time it’s like things are going in circles.
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