izigame.me

Finished what I think is the final boss of Returnal (although wouldn't be surprised if there was a secret boss past this as there's still plenty in the roguelike that I've not found). Definitely a recommend, but with a few caveats.

The moment to moment gameplay is fantastic. The movement and shooting both feels really, really good There’s an invulnerable dash on a very short cooldown that you get from the start of the game, and mid way through you get a grapple hook which you can use to fling yourself around (only to pre-defined points in the environment, but each combat arena will have a few). It means that you’re constantly moving at high speed around the arena keeping ahead of the melee enemies and dodging projectiles.

The “bullet hell” aspect of the game is cool. It’s very visually impressive and makes it stand out from other FPSs, with even the most basic enemies shooting out horizontal lines of projectiles rather than just a single glob at you. However, I’d say that it only gets half way to being a “proper” bullet hell, to be a bit snobby about it? The pretty bullet patterns are absolutely there, but in practice most attacks tend to boil down to lines you need to jump over, blasts you need to avoid, or walls that you need to dodge through (this is way-oversimplified, but gives an idea). To me, an important part of the joy of bullet hell games is dodging and weaving *through* the gaps in cool projectile patterns, and I think the game is just too fast paced (with the player having too big a hitbox) for that to really be feasible. The bosses were visually very impressive, but difficulty was mostly reliant on layering more of these same types of basic attacks together rather than doing anything particularly unique.

The graphics are gorgeous, you can really tell that it was a PS5 game, particle effects are used liberally and to great effect. Each of the game’s biomes are very distinct and beautiful, some of them even breaking out of the mould of what I expected a procedurally-generated map to be able to do.

However, the big selling point of the game, the roguelike aspect, was almost kind of a downside in the end? The base gameplay is good enough that fighting procedurally generated rooms of enemies didn't get old for me at all, but it's draining. A run going through all of the biomes takes like 2H if you're being methodical and not skipping anything (which you want to do unless you want to make the game harder for yourself). To be fair, there are some (limited and very expensive) ways to get one-off respawns/checkpoints, which really helps with this, as it can save the forwards momentum you’ve been building all this time from being ruined by a single really bad fight (these were apparently added in patches post release, great decision). A game like Hades has quite long runs too, but here’s why resets felt so much more draining in Returnal:
• Powerups: I think that this is Returnal’s biggest problem. The powerups are each reasonably impactful, but still relatively minor, and almost always behind the scenes stat boosts. You also end up accumulating them a lot of them in each run that goes deep. These two aspects add together to mean that they sort of fade into the background as background power increases, and don’t meaningfully affect the feel of the run.
• Weapons: The game has an impressive variety of interesting guns, with each of them having a unique set of perks that (unlike the player powerups mentionned above) do meaningfully affect how they feel to use. In each run, you’re swapping between guns as you find better ones, which keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, but it again makes every run feel kind of the same as you use every weapon in every run. I wonder how the game would feel if you only had one weapon per run or per biome but you could upgrade it as you went?
• Enemy variety: The enemy variety is decent enough, but not huge.
• Room variety: The rooms that the procedural generation algorithm uses to make the maps are beautiful, detailed, and surprisingly varied even within each biome. I think the game has just about enough variety that I didn’t get bored, but you go through a lot of rooms in each run so I definitely started noticing a lot of repeats in the first biome by the end.

The world is detailed and evocative, but there unfortunately isn’t much story to be found, aside from a few short chunks. It feels like more of a “vibes”-based narrative rather than a narrative, which is fair enough, but I ultimately found it quite unsatisfying. There’s also a LOT of wordy item descriptions, which quickly got a bit one-note and might have contributed to my feeling of fatigue as I was reading through yet more eldrich/scp-esque prose hours into a run.


The last thing I wanted to touch on is the difficulty. The game doesn’t have any difficulty options, and it’s one difficulty is pretty dang tough I especially found the boss of the first biome to be a wall for a while, which is a shame as all of the coolest weapons and even the grappling hook are locked behind progressing to future areas. There’s very little “meta-progression” stored between runs, so there are really very few options for players to build themselves an easier path, and I’m worried that with less gaming experience than me will just find this game too hard and quit, missing out on a great game. An odd decision that contributes to this is that when you’re on full health, dropped healing instead slowly increases your max HP, so the game gets easier the better you are at it?