dailynewsnblog
For many players, Returnal is a roguelike so punishing that it’s hard to stick with. For those who actually break through, however, it’s something closer to a trance, a dark and deep meditation on pain and guilt. Five years later, I still find myself haunted by Returnal’s punishing combat, but even more so by its chilling narrative.
In Returnal, you play as Selene, a deep-space scout who crash-lands on the hostile alien planet Atropos while investigating a mysterious signal known as “White Shadow.” She wakes up from the crash and quickly finds her own corpse, realizing that she’s trapped in a time loop where every death resets the world. You’ll recognize individual combat zones, enemies, and the gear you collect, but the way it’s all stitched together is randomized. In this roguelike structure, progress isn’t even incremental. It’s literally just how far you can get before you inevitably, repeatedly, brutally die. Experience isn’t mechanical. It’s literal. You learn how it all fits together, remember how enemies move, and learn how various mechanics interact. A select few impactful permanent upgrades mark the only real means of progression.
From the beginning, Returnal demands that you ignore your instincts. You can try to dodge away from enemy fire or even to the side, but more often than not, you’ll still get hit. Because enemies don’t take potshots at you. It’s a bullet-hell where they fire torrents of plasma. That’s where the game teaches you the first big lesson: you need to dodge through the oncoming hail and close the distance between you and the threat if you want to survive. It’s counterintuitive in a way that reminds me of a FromSoftware game. So often, the best way to handle a huge threat is to stand close enough that they can’t get a proper bearing on your position. The best defense is a good offense, and distance is the mind killer.
That tension permeates many of the game’s other systems. Much like the setting, they feel scary at first, almost like traps. But leaning in is the only way to survive. There are Parasites — literal parasitic alien organisms — that give you some kind of perk at the expense of a debuff. Then there’s Malignancy, an infection that plagues some items you find. Do you risk claiming the resource even though there’s a chance you’ll get hit with some kind of Malfunction? Every instinct tells the logical player to avoid these things. But the vision of a Selene who succeeds in Returnal is one that defeats the game’s final boss with almost a dozen parasites clinging to her body as she gasps for air. A strong run requires power spikes you can only get from Parasites and Malignancy.
All of this resonates with Returnal’s narrative themes quite cleanly. With Selene as your proxy, you initially assume her journey is about escaping this planet. But the further you get, you both begin to question the real nature of this world — and Selene’s sanity. Is any of this even real? Is Selene’s guilt over some past tragedy making her psychotic? Could she be trapped in some kind of literal hell as punishment for her sins?
Instead of focusing on escape, the story evolves into one of Selene accepting her fate and diving ever deeper into the nightmare to understand her psyche. Because so much of what we’re shown reeks of symbolism and metaphor, it’s not even made clear whether the only way out is through. There is simply no other choice. But confronting that darkness at the deepest depths, whether that’s at the center of the planet or deep in Selene’s mind, can only be done by leaning in for the dive.
Selene’s utter isolation enhances the drama. Inside a randomly appearing manifestation of her old home back on Earth, you find vestiges of her past, fractured memories, and what could just be distorted alternate timelines. None of it makes much sense, but it reflects her deep anxiety about what we can only assume are past mistakes and trauma. Selene had a strained relationship with her mother and longed to be an astronaut. She also seemingly had a child named Helios whose fate seems grim, to say the least. Connected to it all is an astronaut in an old-school space suit who appears on Atropos that haunts you like a ghost.
The game’s first biome, Overgrown Ruins, is a series of overgrown corridors in a forest where the flora and fauna turn to track your movements. It’s claustrophobic and anxious. The second, Crimson Wastes, is a sprawling alien desert that looks like Mars, but with vast alien ruins. Then there’s Derelict Citadel, an alien fortress that introduces fast-moving verticality. As you progress, each feels more disorienting than the last — and that’s just three of the six biomes.
Like most players, I hit a wall somewhere between the second and third biome. Enemies and the spaces they inhabit feel totally different. But once I stopped playing cautiously and threw myself recklessly into the experience — while paying closer attention to the way pieces of gear interact with one another — I had one single majestic run where I blew right through the end of Derelict Citadel all the way to the fifth biome’s boss. Talking to some of my colleagues, this seems like a common experience: if you can overcome the intense skill checks of the game’s first half, the back half gets more manageable.
According to data from PSN Profiles, just 27.95% of players defeated Ophion, the final boss in Returnal’s main story at the end of act two (biome six) which triggers the credits. That seems rather low for a modern AAA game. And only 18.10% of people went on to collect all six Sunface Fragments and face Ophion again to unlock the game’s true ending.
Saros sands down Returnal’s challenging formula into a power fantasy
Housemarque’s latest shooter tries to iterate on Returnal with mixed success
For a lot of players, that’s where Returnal ends — somewhere in those early biomes, before the systems click and the rhythm sets in, long before Selene’s descent starts to make any kind of sense. I can see why. The game feels hostile by design and compels you to make decisions that feel wrong. When the challenge feels so intense, the last thing that sounds like a good idea is to take more reckless risks.
But the deeper you go, the clearer it becomes that survival was never the point. You’re meant to embrace the loop’s flow, including the part where you die countless times. I think subconsciously, Selene’s journey to confront the deepest darkness of her psyche scares us. Nobody wants to examine the worst parts of themselves or their greatest trauma. Returnal tells us that we don’t have a choice.
For the vast majority of players who tried Returnal, it’s a punishing roguelike that never quite feels fair, so they bounced right off of it. For the ones who break through, it becomes positively hypnotic. That’s the version of Returnal that still lingers. Not the frustration or the deaths, but that one run where everything clicked, where the fear gave way to momentum, and the game stopped fighting me long enough to show me what’s really in those darkest depths of Atropos.
And like Selene, once you see it, there’s no going back.
