Returnal, or Arcade is Dead, Long Live Housemarque
Donald Everhart, Contributing Editor
I wonder what it would be like to play Returnal and experience everything for the first time. This thought applies in-game and out: in Returnal’s opening minutes, it rapidly becomes clear that its main character has been here before. The player and Selene find this out together by examining a human corpse. Selene rolls the body over and checks the identification on the body’s helmet, which is conveniently obscuring the face inside. She gasps. In subsequent lives, the player will find other Selenes. Most carry recordings with dire existential warnings and exhortations about her continued pattern of death and resurrection.
Returnal (2021).
Meanwhile, as the player on the other side of the screen, I can’t tell if Returnal is coming together as something other than a collection of influences. Low-lying fog, biomechanical architectures, and signs of an absent sentient species abound. Inside her crashed spaceship, Selene can load up a computer in retro-futuristic green, complete with a startup animation for Astra, the organization or company for whom she works. If all of that sets off decades of science fiction memories from Alien to, well, Aliens, Alien³, Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant, I assume that was the intent. Yes, it’s familiar. Yes, Returnal makes it look good.
Returnal (2021), or is it Prometheus?
I’m a sucker for design inspired by H.R. Geiger, Syd Mead, and Ridley Scott. Housemarque, the developers of Returnal, have created a polished interpretation of their design sensibilities that shows off the PS5’s capabilities. That includes detailed haptic feedback, surround sound, fabulous lighting, detailed textures, and responsive animations. Tentacles large and small reach out towards Selene. Some resemble harmless anemones, but other tendrils grasp from wiry parasites. The largest ones burst into the frame from predatory fauna, which (at least in the first area) lie in wait, hissing from the darkness. This creates a dynamic of quiet exploration punctured and punctuated by explosions of reaching, grasping, and shooting particles, lasers, and limbs.
Housemarque’s previous work largely involves dedicated riffs on arcade-style, shoot-’em-up style games. Waves of enemies and obstacles would crash onto the screen, piling up and creating moving mazes for players to blow apart. In anticipation of Returnal, I played a few old favorites - Super Stardust HD on PS3, Resogun and Nex Machina on PS4. All three are clear antecedents of the colorful waves of fire that beset Selene. But Housemarque is up to a little more with Returnal. Once again, Housemarque displays their ambition to bring the frenetic, bullet-heavy spirit of arcade action to a new generation. This time, Housemarque is doing so within the frame of an over-the-shoulder 3D narrative action game.
Nex Machina (2017)
To some degree, Returnal was made by heartbroken developers. With Nex Machina and Matterfall, both released in 2017, Housemarque took big swings. Nex Machina comprised a grand vision of how to update arcade action for the present (if you read my Moose Life review, you know I’m a big fan of that kind of thing). Matterfall was an attempt to bring sidescrolling, platforming action together with massive quantities of projectiles and fast dodges. While Nex Machina arguably succeeded in the eyes of many critics, Housemarque has repeatedly shared their disappointment at its commercial failure. Matterfall is rarely mentioned at all.
Even in the celebratory PR notice that Housemarque sent out the day before Returnal’s launch date, they couldn’t avoid some depressing reflection on their own history. Referencing an earlier statement of his, co-founder Ilari Kuittinen wrote that, “Although we managed to release one of the best reviewed new game of 2017 according to metacritic, we were certainly left disappointed with the sales leading me to declare #arcadeisdead and ending our long standing commitment to the arcade genre.” He was talking about Nex Machina, a game which continues to be celebrated. And Nex sure is present in Returnal, in the form of every “cablepunk” monster reaching and shooting in Selene’s direction.
Matterfall (2017).
It’s a shame that Matterfall goes unacknowledged, even by Kuittinen, because it seems just as much an antecedent to Returnal as Nex. Matterfall’s protagonist, Avalon Darrow, is a closed-mouth, no-nonsense cleaner sent in to deal with a spill of corrupted, animate stuff that manipulates glowing blue and orange voxels into deadly forms and projectiles. As I wrote for Unwinnable last year, players could be forgiven if they overlooked that there was supposed to be a character within Darrow’s armored suit. She doesn’t speak at any point during gameplay – her only words come and go in the introduction and after the final boss. Darrow is all business. In what little characterization she has, she is fairly derivative of Metroid’s Samus. She seems like an attempt at a character, just as Matterfall is an attempt to combine dense, shoot-’em-up action with two-dimensional platforming.
Selene is more complicated, and it’s not just due to Housemarque’s transition to glossy, over-the-shoulder 3D. She has her own dialogue, as well as echoes of her past self in the form of recordings. There’s backstory and lore to be found, both in files in her crashed ship and in the manifestation of her earthly home, jarringly present within Returnal’s alien landscape. From the start, she pursues the mysterious “White Shadow” broadcast, which carries a tinge of initially unexplained familiarity. She takes a ship, jumping over some protocols as she does so, to land on Atropos, the planet that’s the source of the broadcast. Whether or not that planet is the source of the time loop, I don’t yet know. All I know for sure is that each time Selene dies due to my clumsy maneuvering, she crashes her ship and starts over from the beginning.
Beautiful firefights in Returnal (2021).
So far, I’ve enjoyed my repeated attempts to progress in Returnal. In addition to those voice logs, there’s a lot of layered mechanics to explore. The best way to figure out how the game works is to play it. Each run at this point is still a bit of a note-taking exercise - “weapon proficiency” rises slowly, but increases my chances of finding stronger weaponry. Parasites boost some aspects, like health, running speed, or damage, but lower others. “Adrenaline” is built in just like a combo meter from a pure arcade shooter, rising as Selene scores hits, granting increased abilities, and resetting to zero if Selene takes a hit. Altogether, there’s a lot of tradeoffs and spinning plates to keep track of, especially while I try to bend Selene’s arc through each area towards maximum preparedness for the boss fight.
Returnal’s bosses are tough. I find it more difficult to dodge Returnal’s patterns of laser beams and constellations of spherical bullets than I might if this were a top-down arcade shooter. For the most part, though, the hits seem fair. I still need to refine the timing for my dodges. Or jumps. And to make sure they’re going in the right direction. While continually firing and keeping my target in sight. It’s a lot, but the game’s responsive controls and the punch of its weapons make me feel as though there are indeed ways through Returnal’s overwhelming cascades of fire.
Tentactular nightmares in Returnal (2021).
This is a game that’s very demanding of attention, both in precision and in endurance. Even a failed run through the first area can take around forty minutes to do. It’s unfortunate that there’s no option to save mid-run and pick things up later, as there are with many other roguelikes. Housemarque may be open to adding that kind of option in the future, but at the moment they have nothing to announce. Considering that Returnal is a bigger, badder amalgamation of many of their previous games, they might have done well to consider that it takes a great deal longer to play through a session, too. Arcade-length this is not.
Even so, when I have enough time to devote to it, I’m excited to start another incarnation of Selene and run the Atropian gauntlet. For the classicists out there (or, more likely, everyone who has googled it), fate is built right into the name of the planet on which Selene irresistibly finds herself. So far, all signs point to Selene meeting the same fate over and over, even if the journey takes slightly different paths. Here’s hoping that Returnal’s story is a little more flexible than your typical tragedy. Hey, it has enough other influences – I guess I’ll see if this turns out more like the ending to Aliens or the start of Alien³.
