This means that unlike traditional single-player experiences, your hard-earned progress isn’t saved after each level. Every inch of this stunningly rendered planet seems to be teeming with life – but for the most part, you won’t want to find it.įor those new to roguelikes, these procedurally generated playgrounds task you with making it through the entire game without hitting the ‘game over’ screen. Glowing ancient stones look authentically chipped and worn. Shifting the historically 2D roguelike genre into gloriously ray-traced 3D environments, Returnal shuns the cartoony look of genremates Hades and Enter The Gungeon in favour of HR Geiger’s skin-crawling Alien aesthetic.Īs high-quality textures reveal the sickening sights lurking behind each corner and eerie lighting illuminates the glow of distant creatures, everything in Returnal feels grotesquely alive. The first thing I notice about this nightmarish planet is just how stunning it looks. Once Selene clambers out of the wreckage and steps foot on the festering planet of Atropos, the camera snaps into an over-the-shoulder perspective – and the horror begins. Yet it offers players a valuable lesson: in this world, nowhere is safe. Like everything else in Returnal, this immersive intro takes me completely off guard, transforming the traditionally passive cutscene into something that’s impossible to ignore. With the Helios’ circuit boards frying before our heroine’s eyes, the ship bursts into flames, sending more powerful jolts cascading across my palms – and Selene nosediving straight into a mysterious planet. As her Helios spacecraft spirals dangerously out of orbit, the DualSense’s haptic feedback purrs into action, bombarding my wrists with a flurry of violent vibrations. Launching straight into a dramatic cutscene, I find my mysterious protagonist, Selene, desperately wrestling for control of her plummeting ship.
Now as millions of DualSense controllers gather dust, Sony is hoping that Returnal, its latest exclusive, will make the PS5 feel essential once again. Five months after the giddy launch highs of Miles Morales, Astrobot and Demon Souls, lucky owners of the coveted console have had few reasons to actually turn it on.
Following a console generation that landed with more of a whimper than a bang, it’s safe to say that Sony’s latest PlayStation 5 exclusive has something to prove.