Returnal might just be the next big exclusive in Sony’s growing stable of properties, and it’s not from any of the publisher’s first-party studios.

The game is actually from Finnish developers Housemarque, who’s best known for the arcade-inspired shooters Resogun and Nex Machina. While the studio already has more than a dozen games to its name, Returnal marks its first foray into big budget, triple-A-styled territory. It’s without a doubt the studio’s most ambitious and high-profile project yet. From what I’ve played, it could be the game that propels them to mainstream fame.

The coolest thing about Returnal is that it plays like an indie, but it has the visual flare and performance power of a triple-A blockbuster. At its core, the game is a third-person shooter with roguelike elements. You’ll be running through procedurally-generated maps and dying repeatedly, only to do it all over again.

If you’ve never played a roguelike before, that might sound really repetitive. However, it’s anything but.

Sure, you lose some of your items when you die – with the exception of a few permanent upgrades – but there’s this overarching sense of progression, where you know you’re getting stronger and closer to unraveling the mysteries of the story with each run.

Non-stop thrills

In Returnal, you’ll play as Selene, a space pilot trapped in an endless time loop while stranded on the alien planet called Atropos. Each time you die, you wake back up in your crashed ship, doomed to relive the same events again and again. The only way to break out of this cycle is to fight your way through the hordes of hostile beings that inhabit the shape-shifting planet.

That’s about everything the game reveals to you when you start. What’s great about this narrative is that it ties back to the roguelike gameplay. You’re not just doing runs for the sake of added replayability. Instead, you’re collecting pieces of story, albeit small ones, with each new life cycle. It’s like solving a puzzle piece by piece; it draws you in; and keeps you wanting to find out more.

Returnal also features an ever-changing map, which is divided into six different biomes; these biomes are then subdivided into rooms. When you die, the placement of these rooms are switched up along with all the weapons and items they hold. Enemy spawn locations are changed too. No two life cycles are exactly the same. So there’s no way for you to know and prepare for what lies ahead of you. This keeps the game thrilling as you’re forced to really learn the game’s systems and be quick on your feet.

Adding to the thrill is the game’s bullet hell style gunplay, where you have to dodge and weave through an overwhelming barrage of gunfire as you try to kill your enemies. This is where Housemarque’s previous experience in this genre truly shines. They nail the arcade-like shooting down to a tee: the combat is fast and fluid; the controls are tight; and the enemies are unrelenting.

Plus, the weapons all feel really good to use; there’s a variety of them, most of which are kind of standard shooter archetypes, including a pistol, a shotgun, and an assault rifle, to list a few.

All the weapons have an oomph to them that’s intensified by the great use of the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers of the DualSense controller. The motors are quite precise in creating rumble and vibration feedback that replicates everything from a ship crashing and burning to rain droplets hitting the ground. It’s truly immersive. Not since Astro’s Playroom has there been a game that takes advantage of the PS5’s controller technology this well.

All skill

Make no mistake about it though: the game is challenging. It even tells you so at the very beginning. Combat can go from zero to a hundred in an instant. Death is a guarantee. But the game never feels unfair. Dying is almost always your fault.

That’s what’s likely to drive you to keep trying over and over again. It never feels frustrating to bite the dust and lose your progress; it actually makes you want to keep going for another round.

Another thing worth mentioning: the game has a risk-versus-reward system in the way it handles weapons and items. For instance, you can pick-up parasites on your runs. These are equippable items that typically come with both a buff and debuff to your stats. You can, say, have one that lets you regenerate health when it’s low but lowers your guns’ damage output.

There are also malfunctions that similarly come with both positive and negative effects. Unlike parasites though, you can remove the negative effect by doing a specific task. Having to weigh the trade-offs of the items you pick-up spices up the game as you get further and further.

On top of all this, you also have to pick between weapons you come across as you can only carry one at a time. And, again, because you don’t know what’s waiting for you behind the next door, you can be gambling on your decision to equip a certain weapon versus that of another. These moment-to-moment decisions can dramatically change the strategies you employ to defeat your enemies.

From the slow-burn storytelling to the way it challenges your skills, there’s no part of Returnal that seems to fit the industry mold for a blockbuster release. And that works to its favor.

It’s breaking new ground by bringing a taste of that indie niche to a market dominated by competitive shooters, battle royale titles, and open-world games.

It’s also the first game to feel truly next-gen, running in dynamic 4K resolution at a steady 60 frames per second with ray-tracing enhancements and zero loading screens across an entirely seamless map. If you take all that, there’s just no way that it can accommodate the PS4.

Of course, that’s unfortunate for PS4 owners. But for PS5 owners, this is the game that breaks out of that cross-gen transition period and takes full advantage of the new hardware. And it’s the best glimpse yet at what we can expect from games of this generation. – Rappler.com