 Not only do I love hard games, I find it impossible to enjoy easy games. Assassin's Creed is basically unplayable now because it's pointlessly easy. Destiny 2 instantly loses me when there's no new content because the vast majority of the game is just too easy. On top of that, I'm a long time fan of House Mark games. I came across their games years ago when my binding of Isaac obsession sent me chasing every twin stick shooter out there. House Mark was one of the very best twin stick shooter developers. Their games were small, tight, focused arcade style top down shooters with flashy graphics and intense combat. They might have been the best bullet hell developer in the world. I say all this right at the start because I should love Returnal completely. I think I might actually be the target audience for this game. And yet, as much as I love the combat, I don't think I've recently played a game that annoys me as much as this one did. And that annoyance is precisely because I should love this game, but I don't totally love this game. I'm not even convinced I like this game half the time. The PS5 got its first big exclusive release since Demon's Souls and it didn't come from Santa Monica or Gorilla or Naughty Dog. Instead, it came from a small little indie studio in Scandinavia. The game costs $70 and I think it's very likely that price tag came to affect the actual design. Because while Returnal has some of the very best movement, the flashiest graphics, the snazziest haptics, and the toughest combat, it also has layers of shit smeared across the design that seem to exist only to make sure you need 30 hours to beat 5 levels before getting your money's worth. Let's talk about all the big things that work really well in Returnal and all the little things that work terribly after the logo. I was texting with my friend Larry as I began playing this game and for the first few hours I was beyond impressed. Movement in Returnal is about as good as any action game you will play. You're quick, your jumps are responsive enough to manage tricky platforming, and the game is reasonable about fall damage. Most importantly, you've got a dash with generous eye frames. This is the basic stuff that any action game needs to get perfect if it wants to be great, and Returnal gets every one of them exactly right. It feels great to move around. A game's difficulty can only be in relation to the tools it gives the player. Doom Eternal is the most perfectly difficult game ever, and that's because you have all the needed tools to handle any encounter. Now, no game is actually always your fault when you fail. That's a good myth. Unless you count, oh damn, I ran left into this room not realizing that would end up with me on the side of the room where a baron of hell spawns. But great games like Eternal, Neo, and Souls keep the percentage of deaths that are your fault very, very high. Then a game like AC Valhalla can't even try to make the game hard because you simply don't have the tools available to make challenging fun. Movement and animations are sluggish and weightless, and the dodge is more concerned with looking realistic than with being a fun combat tool in a video game. Twin stick rolling in armor isn't realistic, but it sure is a fun game mechanic. If Dark Souls 3 had the same dodge as Valhalla, the whole game has to change because you no longer have the tools to make difficulty fun. Because House Mark is a twin stick shooter dev, they're quite good at realizing it's better that a mechanic feels good than looks realistic. When it comes to weapons, Returnal gets the big things right too. They're interesting looking. They sound great. They're balanced well for the enemies that the game has. I mean, kinda. We'll get to that in a section about the shit the game fails at, but the big things are all really well done. For instance, House Mark has always excelled at art design. Even their small little indie twin stick shooters were great looking games, but Returnal takes things to a new level. It wouldn't be crazy to call Returnal one of the best looking games ever made. Everything about the visual presentation on offer is top shelf. It's a benefit of having an almost blood-borne like knack for making the entire package perfectly reinforce the story of the game. The visuals keep you interested, but also offer tantalizing clues about what's actually going on. Each new level is distinct and interesting, and even when the game starts reusing assets halfway through, they're presented in a way that feels totally fresh. The lighting is phenomenal to look at, though it ends up presenting some annoying gameplay issues and particle effects might be the finest I've ever seen in a game. The levels have an intense amount of interactivity that is just awesome. Breaking statues, or sheets of ice, seize the geometry crumble into convincing pieces. I'm embarrassed to admit that I played the game for like 20 hours, and my son played for about 10 minutes and realized that these laser spotlight guys, you can shoot them in their eyes close. That's awesome. In fact, everything from the gameplay, to the lighting, to the particle effects, and even the way the story is presented, feel strongly influenced by Remini's excellent 2019 title control. It's that kind of visual package. Though the core gameplay in Returnal is better than control, and that's without a doubt. Returnal's basic combat system is spectacular. All the issues that pissed me off with the game have nothing to do with how the actual moment-to-moment combat flows, but are rather tied to balance, length, and the limits of the roguelite genre. Returnal is an extremely challenging game, just mechanically. If you turned enemy damage down 25%, Returnal would still be one of the most challenging games around because it relies on both extreme twitch skill and extreme pattern recognition. The game is very souls-like in that the entire system relies on knowing when to balance offense and defense. The vast majority of enemies only have a few attacks that are well telegraphed, Those attacks severely punish spamming of any kind. You can't dodge spam. Attacks come out so often and are so long-lasting, the player has to be judicious about how they move and which enemies are prioritized. In many games, a player is pushed to take out dangerous enemies first and leave the fodder for last. That's how something like Eternal handles most arenas. In fact, Eternal just continually spawns adds until the dangerous enemies are eliminated. Returnal makes the player spasmodically run around the arena, killing the small enemies while avoiding the dangerous ones because the small enemies are in the habit of flooding the arena with overlapping long-lasting attacks. In fact, if there's one problem with the basic core combat here, it's that a few of the super powerful enemies have like, undodgeable, almost instantly firing off melee lunge attacks. These are incredibly fucking frustrating in a game that's this precise and all of them should have had better tells, but for the most part, 99% of everything in the game feels great. When Returnal is firing at all cylinders, it plays very much like any other bullet hell game. You need to be in an almost trance-like state or else you'll fuck it up. And Returnal only lets you fuck up two or three times before you're dead. Most of the time I'm actually in combat in Returnal. I find it to be one of the best games I've ever played. Even after it kept pissing me off, I kept playing because it feels that good. Unfortunately, there are several things that take what should be an almost perfect action game and make it pointlessly frustrating. To the point that several times I decided it was not worth continuing. I did eventually beat the game because near the end, progression suddenly speeds up, but Returnal spends dozens of hours punishing the player for both small mistakes and even worse, with brute force RNG the player has no control over. It's long. It's really long. Spelunky is one of the hardest games ever made. It is ridiculously brutal and unforgiving. Binding of Isaac is far harder than most people will recall, and Dead Cells and Hades are highly challenging games that slowly become easier as the player unlocks better items and permanent upgrades. The entire roguelite genre is based upon this formula. The games require both mastery of the mechanics, levels, and enemies, but also slowly make the game easier as you unlock things. All these games also rely massively on RNG to decide how the run will go. You can beat Isaac without picking up an item or without getting hit. It is insanely difficult, but it can be done. However, within the first 10 or 15 hours, you will also end up looking into a brimstone, bended, spued, and tammy head run, or a guppy transformation that will let you blast through the game. That's one of the core things that keeps you playing in Isaac or Dead Cells. Beating the game once isn't the goal. The player needs to beat the game over and over to really finish it. And most of these games allow the player to feel totally overpowered every five or ten runs. Dying on the third level of Isaac stings a hell of a lot less when you're coming off a run where you entered each room and blew everything up instantly by pressing a button. There's one other thing that all the best roguelite games have in common. How long a full run ends up taking. A successful run of Nuclear Throne, Gungeon, Isaac, or Spelunky can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how much you explore. I'm the kind of guy who enters every single room in the level, so my runs are usually on the long side, but it's insanely rare for a roguelite run to take more than an hour. This is an incredibly important design choice. Dying in the middle of a good but not great run sucks. But it's balanced by the fact that you only invested 35 minutes. Returnal is pretty much a buy the books roguelite aside from two big differences. First, there are no overpowered runs in Returnal. In fact, the very first one I had was the last run I ever did when I beat the game for a second time. Returnal doesn't have a guppy transformation. There is no brimstone tammy's head, it just doesn't happen. And two, a successful run of Returnal does not take 40 minutes. It can take two and a half hours, sometimes three hours. I'm pretty sure I've had runs that took three hours. Dying in hell in Isaac after like 35 minutes is frustrating. Dying to a boss in Returnal after two hours is horrendous. It is almost game breakingly shit. Returnal does have the normal get more powerful overtime by unlocking stuff loop. But it is insanely slow. You find new weapons like once every four or five hours. And you find new weapon effects, but you need to power those weapon effects up. They're not instantly unlocked. Now you do have some control over the length. After defeating a boss, you can hypothetically skip levels to get back to where you were. Hypothetically. But in reality, you simply cannot. I spent maybe five hours skipping directly to the next level after I beat the first boss because that's what the game seemed to imply I needed to do. And repeatedly I failed before realizing that actually you cannot do that and live. Enemies do so much damage that fully leveling up your health is mandatory. And that means carefully clearing each level in its entirety to find and buy every single upgrade possible. More than that, if you fail to level up your weapon proficiency, you will simply arrive at a point where you cannot out DPS the enemies. While the enemy design in Returnal is very smart and makes for extremely satisfying combat, it also creates a system where if you're unable to quickly kill enemies, you will simply be overwhelmed. I'd say like 90% of my deaths were caused by falling and by not being able to kill enemies fast enough to handle an encounter. Now again, Returnal feels amazing to play and the combat can be masterful, but it also asks a ton of the player. There's a Gears of War active reload system that feels like an almost completely pointless extra layer of difficulty, layered on top of RNG, layered on top of a base game that's already by its very nature an insanely demanding game. This has made even worse by the fact that RNG controls the enemy encounters. The following clip is the very first enemy encounter ever run with the starting pistol. This isn't at all uncommon. Runs will end because you simply do not have the tools to deal with a room, period. But even though it becomes quickly obvious that you need to clear the entire level in order to progress the game, Returnal still has a bunch of design decisions that make this as annoying as possible. Bosses do not drop health when defeated, and almost always drop one useless item. I assume this is to make you realize you only need to fight each boss once, but it also means that fighting the boss again is totally pointless, and it means that the first time through, when you finally beat the level and taken down the boss, you get jack shit for doing it. This is like the polar opposite of what most roguelite games do, where the boss drops the best items. The bosses in this game have the whole Dark Souls 2 thing going on, where they are way way easier than the levels, but the bosses themselves are just amazing. They mix music, atmosphere, and particle effects to be the most memorable things in the game. It took 4 tries to beat the first boss, but then I beat every other boss on the first or second try. And the one time it took me 2 tries because I didn't understand what to do in the third phase of this boss. These bosses are challenging, but they can be learned, and it seems a shame to skip them every time. Especially because you're going through the whole damn level anyway. But if you're only going to get one garbage item, and no health, why would you even bother? What a strange and ultimately kind of dumb decision on the design. Lastly, another convention of the roguelite genre is the cursed item. Almost every roguelite game features items that require trade-offs. In dead cells there were those cursed chests that you could open for better loot, but then make you kill 10 enemies without being hit to end the curse. This system adds a fun wrinkle to the genre and adds a pleasant risk-reward decision for the players to make. But Returnal takes this way too far. Almost all of the powerful parasites have extreme negative effects. Some are so ridiculous I doubt any person ever will even take them once. They are the ones that make it impossible to use healing items. Why would any person ever take that? There are other ways to heal, but they're all based on luck and RNG. I doubt it's even possible to beat the game using that item. There's another debuff that crops up on shit all the time that increases your dodge cooldown to like 5 seconds. This item literally makes the game impossible. There are multiple enemies that send attack patterns that require frequent dodging. There are groups of mobs with overlapping attacks. The second half of the game has rooms with multiple of these guys with their attacks overlapping. Then opening chests or picking up healing items can curse you and the debuff is random with the way to clear the curse also random. It might be something easy like kill 10 enemies or it could require collecting 250 gold which is what you get from my 8 combat arenas. Or it could be kill enemies simultaneously 4 times which is often basically impossible. It can only be done with like 2 weapons and it's insanely rare to be able to melee 2 enemies at the same time. I twice got the dodge debuff attached to the kill enemies at once thing. These are both automatic run enders. By the end of the game you will unlock a rare consumable that clears debuffs but it's one of the most rare consumables to find. And in the final level almost every single item is cursed. Every single one. And worst of all an enemy appears who literally curses you with his attacks. I managed to beat the final boss on my second time through the level mainly because I got lucky the curses the enemy put on me were mild ones that don't matter as opposed to the first time when he hit me with the take damage when picking up items and take damage when reloading your weapon debuff. Returnal is already insanely reliant on RNG because DPS is king in this game. If you can't do enough damage to enemies fast enough you lose period. And the damage you do is reliant on finding the right gun at the right level with the right stats with the right perks and those also being at the right level. Adding even more extremely aggravating and harsh RNG on top of that makes the game needlessly punishing. When you add that RNG on top of the extreme length of runs it is a recipe for screaming. I haven't had a game make me actually yell in several years. I have made a concerted effort to keep my voice low when games piss me off over the last four or five years. I bitch and moan about games all the time but I do it quietly these days. Returnal broke that streak. Many times it broke it. Dying to bullshit and wasting 40 minutes sucks. Dying to bullshit and wasting two and a half hours is unforgivable. And to top this section off this extremely hard game with runs that rely on RNG to a massive degree and with runs that can take up to three freaking hours has a few other wrinkles that take it from amazing to maybe you should wait to buy this territory. Returnal is a buggy fucking mess. The game outright crashed on me four times including once at the very end of the final level and on that run it was the one run I'd ever had that was overpowered. I had several runs where doors stopped opening which is effectively a crash. I finally beat the final boss after an arena I was sure had crashed the game. Usually when the game would crash it would go like my TV speakers were blowing out. Then the game would crash. On the final level that happened again but instead of crashing the game the audio just stopped working. So I finished the level and had the final epic boss fight like this. Then I watched the pre-credits cutscene like this. Epic bro. Now all games have crashes. I've had Isaac crash many times. When Isaac released that was a big problem because there was no saving but Edmund listened to the players and admitted he was wrong and added automatic saving every time you enter a room. So if the doorbell rings or you're just tired or you get called in to work at 11pm you can stop playing and come back to where you were or to be honest you can just turn it off because hell you've only been playing 30 minutes anyway. Obviously Returnal one of the hardest games in the last 10 years that has an issue with crashing requires extreme RNG luck and takes up to 3 hours to complete a run has a save feature. I mean obviously you wouldn't make a game that can have a crash wipe out hours of your players time right? Yeah no there is no save feature. I can't even understand the thinking here and anyone who defends that is fucking wrong flat out wrong. They don't have a different opinion they are wrong. Having a crash wipe out 2 hours of my time is totally fucking unacceptable outrageous actually I'm not even going to spend time explaining why letting a crash wipe out hours of my time is unacceptable that is fucking self evident man. Story no spoilers. So I'm not going to get into the specifics of the story so I don't spoil anything for you. Let's say that Returnal like most roguelite games uses the genre as a story component. Selene keeps dying and being reborn on an alien planet and the game revolves around figuring out what's going on. I quickly basically figured out what was going on because it's rather obvious though I didn't figure out fully exactly why it was going on. Well after completing the game twice to get the full ending I still don't understand because they decided to make it open to interpretation. I think this is annoying bullshit. I found the story components of Returnal to be pretty fucking masterful. It's doled out way too fucking slowly and it kind of screws up a story's pacing to only get new information every four hours but everything about the story from the environmental storytelling to the first person interactive stuff to the cut scenes and dialogue is fantastic. It's so fantastic that I expected them to really deliver a satisfying ending instead that decided they couldn't be fucking bothered to actually explain what happened. Close your ears people because we're gonna do like 20 seconds of spoilers. Skip here to not hear it. Three, two, one, here we go. Okay so very early on I decided that the entire game is actually in Selene's mind. It's pretty obvious that she's not actually on the planet. You find a note rejecting her application to join a space mission and near the end you hear Selene's end of a phone call that is obviously with a surgeon. I ended up coming to the conclusion that Selene had some kind of treatment. At first I thought this was some kind of electroshock or other future treatment for mental illness. The final cutscene implies the game is a form of psychosis related to her guilt at failing to save her daughter's life in a car accident. Selene drove her car off a bridge into a river killing her daughter. This is pretty powerful actually as you realize the significance of the final level being a dive deeper and deeper into a watery abyss. So everything is right there for a powerful ending. But unfortunately House Mark decided to keep things oblique and metaphorical. You can't be certain exactly what happens. You can't be certain what's the significance of the astronaut. You can't be certain who Selene was, where she is, and why she's hallucinating the events of the game. And that is annoying. The ambiguity that pervades the entire game is great. Exactly perfect aside from the needless difficulty making the game take twice as long as it should have, but it's great. However, an ending needs to provide answers. The Sopranos was panned by some for an ending I found to be perfect because it left things unexplained. But that was the point of that ending. Tony Soprano will keep going. Anyone in that diner could be a cop, could be an assassin, could be a gas station attendant. His life will keep going until he is arrested or killed and he'll spend that life not knowing what comes next for him or whether his family is safe. That's the point. That's good ambiguity. It expands the story outward without artificially bringing it to a close. But Returnal is bad ambiguity because it's literally impossible to know the basic core aspects of the story. Who is Selene? What was her job? Who was the astronaut? Why is she hallucinating? Where is she at this moment? These are fundamental aspects that need to be addressed to call a story complete. It is a bullshit cop out to not fundamentally address those things. A way to end the story without having to worry about details or plot holes or contradictions. Instead of doing the hard work of wrapping it up in a consistent, believable, satisfying ending, instead it throws the whole pile into the player's lap and says fuck, you figure it out. Whatever you think could be right man, that's the whole fun. No. No, it's bad storytelling and a failure. It's also arrogant. It takes what was building to be a great story and retroactively makes it a kind of pile of shit. Wrapping up. Okay, Returnal has some of the sweetest fucking third person combat mechanics I have ever played. There are times where it feels like it might be one of the very best third person shooters ever. It's world, levels, enemies, bosses and storytelling other than the non-ending are all top notch shit. So much so that I find myself wondering why is this game a roguelite at all? There's a reason roguelites are generally short on story. Because it's very frustrating to have to fight your way to a cutscene. The games where it works, like Hades, manage to have a very simple story and to dole out that story much more frequently. Every time you die in Hades there's someone to talk to, a joke to hear, something to learn about a character. But Returnal gives you a tiny crumb of story every four hours at best. To get another piece of story you have to at least make it to a boss. It is extremely frustrating to want to learn about a story only to die two hours in a few minutes shy of getting to your goal. When you add that tension to the fact that so many of Returnal's deaths boil down to straight up luck it is a recipe for extreme frustration. Returnal could work as a roguelite with some tweaks. Malignancy and malfunctions need to be tuned way the fuck down. They should be less punishing and the chances should be greatly reduced. Taking on a run ending malfunction, opening a chest, only to find a shitty pistol that's worse than what you're holding is garbage. Having all the healing items in the final level be a coin flip where it's heads you get healed, tails you take fucking damage, is pointless bullshit that does zero to make the game more fun, more interesting, more enjoyable. It just makes it shittier. Having a massive sponge enemy surrounded by exploding enemies who give you devastating random debuffs if he hits you is straight putrid shit. All of that shit should be massively tuned down. The speed at which you start getting better weapons should be increased. Items could be more powerful. The game could, instead of making a painfully slow grind to beat each level, take a page from Isaac and let the player become overpowered occasionally to keep them going. And because it's too late to address the issue of three hour runs, the game straight up needs a save system. Period. End of discussion. There is no argument on the other side that makes a lick of sense. But that's a lot of changes. Which begs the question. Did this game really need to be a roguelite? Wouldn't have worked just as well, in fact better if it had just been a level based shooter. You could even keep the format. You could need to beat each level a few times as you slowly upgraded your power until she manages to figure out the path forward. You could keep it just as hard, but sand out the fury by not totally wasting hours of the player's time every time they die. I find myself suspecting that the extreme RNG based difficulty and offer here isn't as much a design decision as a financial decision. Returnal is a game by a tiny studio known for arcade games that's being sold as a blockbuster first party Sony exclusive. And it delivers in its high quality visuals and tight gameplay. But Sony has decided it's so fucking awesome that its games need to be $70. And you can't sell a 12 hour action shooter for $70. So the game needed to be 30 to 40 hours, which means progression needed to be slowed to a crawl. An RNG needed to kill people dozens of times to make certain that they didn't skill their way to the end by the 8 hour mark. The game just systematically prevents you from doing that. You can learn everything, know everything, make your dodges and simply be unable to take down a room of enemies because you straight up cannot kill them before they kill you. When that happens, it doesn't feel like you died. It feels like the devs killed you. And that feels like shit. It feels fucking infuriating, at least for me. And when I realized that the devs were killing me because they think I need to get my $70 worth, I get even more annoyed. I hope Returnal sells well enough that House Mark becomes a full AAA studio because they are clearly capable of making one of the very best action games in the world. But if they're going to do that, they'd need to fully ditch the arcade game bullshit because these two genres don't fit together. Don't kill me because I'm not allowed to beat the game yet. And maybe if you're going to do a good story, don't tie it to a roguelite unlock system. Oh, and next time, end your fucking story. Don't leave it up to me to make up my mind. I'm not the writer. You do that. I have a job. I can't even score this game, dude. It's a 10 pretty fucking often. Like, very often it is really great. But it's also a negative 50 pretty often. And it's $70. But hey, at least you'll be playing for 30 hours, right? That's the most important thing you got your money's worth. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. I probably do Resident Evil Village, which is actually very good, surprisingly good. Alright, bye.