Returnal
2021
Audio: Portuguese, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Korean, German, Italian · Subtitles: Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, English, French
- shooter
- action
- science fiction
- horror
- single player
- multiplayer
- co-operative
The story
Returnal is a 2021 roguelike third-person shooter video game developed by Housemarque and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It follows Selene Vassos, an astronaut who lands on the planet Atropos in search of the mysterious "White Shadow" signal and finds herself trapped in a time loop. After crash-landing on a shape-shifting alien planet, Selene finds herself fighting tooth and nail for survival. Every time she’s defeated, the player is forced to restart the journey.
What it’s like
Dark, alien and relentlessly kinetic, with a palette of bruised violets, sickly teal and hot orange bursts of tracer fire against black organic terrain. The camera sits close behind a lone astronaut in a third-person frame, so every dodge and sprint feels physical, while the environments shift from crumbling ruins to overgrown biomes to slick, shadowed corridors, each rendered with dense particle haze and smeared light. Sound design leans on low industrial hum, wet alien clicks and sudden silence broken by a sharp synth pulse, and the score swells only in combat. The vibe is dread-laced and disorienting, a sealed-off unease that tightens with each restart. Pacing is fast and punishing: short bursts of frantic bullet-hell fights, then quieter stretches of exploration through strange, unsettling spaces. The emotional register is isolation and grief, following a woman caught in a loop, confronting her own fractured memories. Violence is frequent and stylised, with gunfire, alien gore and creature deaths, and the horror is psychological and atmospheric rather than gratuitous. Best suited to players who want a demanding, moody challenge, late at night, with a taste for cerebral sci-fi horror.
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