Returnal has come crashing onto digital store shelves and reviews are positive. Our own review praised its visuals, tight controls and intriguing premise – but it also briefly lamented one feature. Its lack of a ‘spot’ save.
While roguelikes/lites tend not to offer a ‘Save & Exit’, your average genre entry is usually confined to a more dedicated audience. They also tend to offer less content than Returnal, an ‘indie title on a AAA scale‘.
A Different Level
Housemarque’s space bullet hell has captured the public’s imagination in the days coming up to its release. Positive press, rapturous fan response and a flurry of late pre-orders give the impression that Returnal could be a mainstream hit.
Of course, Returnal carries a great deal of mainstream appeal – something that hasn’t been said about many punishing dungeon-crawling roguelites before. The seemingly infinite loop or ‘leap, dodge, slay’ is undeniably addictive. The controls quickly allow a player be sucked into the punishing but fair resistance to found across Atropos. There is much depth to explore across its many modifiers, loadouts and perks systems, adding variety to its emergent adventure.
Many gamers caught in the wave of expectation will take time to learn to love the roguelite experience. In Returnal, the game saves player milestones and the acquisition of certain items. Once you’ve picked up a melee weapon, slayed a boss, opened a major portal etc. the game will keep not. But when a player dies, Selene crashes to Atropos to start anew.
Her hard-earned obolites, weapons and theirs perks, and even her bearings are gone. Each life offers a new adventure and a new path thanks to its robust procedural dungeon and item placement system.
This system works incredibly well for fostering the challenge and offering great satisfaction for persistent players. The game demands players develop their skill and strategy rather than allowing them to abuse the environment or grind their way past its trials.
There is an undeniable thrill when one has remained alive for a longer than usual spin in Returnal. The gear, loot and perks acquired on a particularly fruitful run seem like a prize. There is an added nervousness over your hard-earned swag when one is confronting a boss for the first time.
The Other Thing
A winning roguelite run tends to be short. A player is responsible for honing their skills and strategy to progress further on each run. The player then opens the path or unlock new items/weapons to make their subsequent runs a little quicker.
But Returnal‘s biomes are relatively large. Depending on the how the dungeons are laid out, it may take you upwards of two hours to get back to where you have just perished. Players inexperienced with bullet hell will take much longer.
Once a player needs to go do something else – the only option is pause the game and leave the console in Rest Mode. Being forced to leave the console in Rest Mode if you aren’t a regular Rest Moder isn’t too great of an annoyance but if are leaving your house for an extended period or have other games you need to play (like a limited-time Resident Evil Gameplay Demo), this is a problem.
As the player continues through Returnal, their runs will become longer. As they do, the odds of a player needing to get on with life or take a break increases and that addition to the game’s demands becomes more of a burden. A burden that fewer and fewer people across the gaming dedication spectrum are likely to tolerate as the game goes on.
You are effectively barred from playing another game on your system. If you accidentally open another game or tap the wrong app on your home screen, that amazing run you were on is gone.
Save and Exit
A hard ‘Save & Exit’ feature may not be very roguelike-like but Returnal represents a fusion of elements from a few genres in an attempt to make something fresh and new. This one concession need not be a compromise to the game’s difficulty nor should it upset the delicate balance of challenge created by Housemarque. Instead, it would be an acknowledgement that external factors, like life itself, shouldn’t add to Selene’s body count.
Do you feel that players should work around the game as it is? Or do you think Returnal needs a ‘Save &’ Quit system? Is the game just meant to be played in sessions so losing progress is to be expected? Let us know in the comments below
Returnal launches today 30th April 2021, exclusively on PlayStation 5
