That said, there’s another side to Returnal’s story, which is the lore for the planet that serves as Returnal’s setting, Atropos. We just get some audio logs that explain Selene’s past and her more recent history, which don’t do enough to get the player invested in her present events. As intriguing as the prospect of a story where a character constantly resurrects is in theory, it doesn’t ultimately mean much unless that character herself is compelling, and Selene isn’t. The trouble is that Selene isn’t a particularly interesting character, and her backstory doesn’t really do much for me from a narrative perspective besides give the game an excuse to have her repeatedly come back to life and occasionally hallucinate astronauts. As she goes deeper, Selene finds that the planet is beginning to mess with her mind more and more, spawning hallucinations of figures from her past and even her own house on Earth. Exploring further reveals that these corpses often contain audio logs left by these past Selenes, each one more unhinged than the next. Returnal’s hero, Selene, stumbles upon a dead human upon arrival, and is quite shocked to find that the corpse appears to be her own - or to be precise, a past version of herself. It’s depressing, which is just the way a strong atmosphere like this should be.īut while the initial feel of Returnal’s plot may sound similar to the adventures of a certain other blonde galactic adventurer, it quickly differentiates itself by focusing much more on the protagonist. There’s very much a feeling of near-hopelessness pervading Returnal being trapped on an alien world where the friendliest entity you can hope to encounter is your ship’s computer. Returnal ’ s set-up does feel a lot like a Metroid game, with much of the same feeling of isolation and discovery from exploration. You may have found yourself reading that paragraph and wondering if you had accidentally stumbled onto a review for Metroid Prime 2. After escaping the wreckage, she finds herself alone on an isolated planet filled with the ruins of a now deceased race, with her only company being a bunch of deformed dark tentacle monsters, some rusty auto turrets, and the bed in her own ship. Upon entering the planet's atmosphere, her spaceship is struck by lightning, and she winds up faceplanting her newly flambee’d ship into an uncharted alien planet. The premise follows a spacefaring woman who winds up tracking a distress signal to an alien planet. although hopefully not too common that EA starts to take notice. Thankfully, Returnal has no such concepts, and instead remains a fully enclosed, tightly knit adventure game that does pave the way for big budget roguelites to become more common. Truthfully, I can’t imagine why it seems like a game based around replayability and randomness would be a prime opportunity to insert microtransactions and lootboxes. Returnal is something of an anomaly amongst other AAA games, as big budget roguelites aren’t exactly common. At an eyebrow raising $70, is it worth a purchase? Could it even be good enough to stand up alone as a solid reason to buy a PS5? Returnal is now available to everyone, or at least everyone fortunate enough to acquire a PS5 while the pandemic makes a mockery of supply-side economics. With it, the opening salvo in the ninth generation of console wars has been fired. The first entirely new major AAA next gen console exclusive has finally landed. By Paul Broussard, posted on / 3,920 Views
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