It plays like a dream. Even if I never make it out of the second biome I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. But then again, I’m the kind of person who buys Sekiro day one and considered beating Madame Butterfly good enough for me.
What does this mean exactly? Sorry if that’s a dumb question. I don’t know what Sekiro is. Is that like Demon’s Souls in Japan and super hard?
It just controls so incredibly well, and the way you are able to run around, dodge and shoot in such a fluid manner is just a delight to experience.
You weren’t asking me, but as I mentioned upthread, I’m here because I like Housemarque’s other games and I specifically like the sci-fi/horror aesthetic that Returnal brings to an otherwise garden-variety rogue-like.
As far as how it handles, compared to other shooters/brawlers, I don’t see it as anything special, and I certainly don’t feel it compares to stuff like Dark Souls and its ilk, let alone other dedicated shooters. But I haven’t gotten as far as the other folks in this thread, so maybe they’re talking about elements I haven’t reached/unlocked yet.
-Tom
I definitely was asking you as much as anyone else :) I’ve been fascinated by your struggles and feel a kin spirit with you because this is how things are for me in so many action games. Demon’s Souls was like that early on for me, but the beauty and atmosphere of the game, plus the wonderful haptic feedback kept me trying to conquer it. I had many many nights where I wanted to throw my controller through the window.
I would compare the later stage gameplay experience to the newer Doom game (2016). You enter these arenas swarming with beasts and you dash/fly/zip around with a high sense of situational awareness, taking out hostiles one at a time with a variety of attacks.
Depending on your current arsenal your attack style changes from hang back and crowd control to up close and personal or any mix in-between. The frenetic movement is fast and enjoyable due to the fact that you are invulnerable during dashes and grappling. The weapons are varied and evolving as they gain new traits and can eventually those traits can be stacked. The surround sound design is phenomenal (especially with headphones) helping determine enemy locations and attacks. The different bioms bring welcome changes in beautiful scenery. The underlying sense of dread and dispar brings that dark souls sense of overcoming overwhelming odds.
I really enjoyed the game (goty personally) but there was a hurtle that I had to overcome to get to that point. There was a good while where I thought there was no way I was going to beat it.
I am usually not a fan of very challenging games, my 40-something year old reflexes are a convenient excuse, but Returnal’s world hooked me and my frustrations with death slowly subsided and were generally replaced by more of an appreciation for the nuances. Design and the flow of combat became more important than sheer progression, I savored specific moments (the dynamic volume increase of the haunting organ music during a particular boss fight sticks with me still.)
There are sessions where RNG will immediately end your run, but the opposite is true too: sometimes everything just clicks, you learn a pattern, find a few lucky drops and
now you’re dominating rooms that used to be a problem.
Lastly, my wife is not a gamer but enjoys watching me play Returnal. We both celebrated joyously after beating the first boss, which was a huge hurdle!
Returnal is much more action focused in combat than the Souls games which were a bit more deliberate. It’s a lot of dodging around and dashing through waves of enemy bullets, with very tight responsive controls. Smartly though it’s not all combat all the time and Housemarque includes downtime between encounters along with some environmental challenge rooms mixed in as well. For me it really was the complete package and if we ever do a GotY vote around here this year it’s my pick for last year.
Yeah sometimes you just need to shoot some aliens and this game is great for that. Why did people pump a billion dollars of quarters into Space Invaders? Shooting aliens is fun.
If find Returnal to be a really oddly designed game, and mostly not for the good. (For context, I just made it to the fourth biome. Maybe things will change.)
The bosses are not much of a challenge, they seem balanced for you to beat them on the 2nd or 3rd try. The patterns are fundamentally simple and usually very clearly telegraphed. Instead the challenge of the game is entirely in getting through the trash mobs unscathed; the penalties for getting hit even occasionally are so big that the game is basically requiring perfection.
Sustained perfection over hours is not particularly interesting, and that’s especially true with no time pressure since it means encouraging a boring conservative playstyle. (Compare to e.g. the souls games which have been steadily moving toward discouraging conservative play and forcing the players to have fun, or for a 3p shooter rogulite comparison the delightfully aggressive Remnant from the Ashes).
A lot of it comes down to the health system. I understand wanting to strictly limit the amount of healing inside a boss / miniboss battle, which is why the consumable silphium vials are so rare. Any hit you take is not just a loss of health, it’s a loss of maximum health since there is no reliable free healing. But it gets worse: this also encourages not picking up the health when you see it, but waiting until you’ve taken damage and then tediously backtracking. (And if you end up not needing the healing, doing the backtracking later intead).
I think they desperately needed to decouple the two to distinct resources, and to eliminate the tedious backtracking as as an optimal strategy. It could easily have been done in a way that did not make the boss battles any easier. E.g maybe you could have a refillable silphium bottle that all the silphium you collect goes into, but that has a really slow animation such that it can’t be used during combat.
To add to the slowness, you still need to scour every room for all the collectibles which is total busywork. Most of it can be done using the minimap totally brainlessly, but of course there are all the secrets that do not show up on the map even once you’ve demonstrated you know the secret locations of that room. So even once you can e.g. beat every biome 1 room in combat without taking a hit, there’s still a lot of low value filler that you need to engage with.
In the best roguelites (e.g. Hades and StS) the early game quickly something you can cruise through with sufficient precision to be on par with having played it slowly and conservatively. As the player you do not begrudge that time, since this is also the point where you are making your build decisions that end up mattering in the long term. Returnal doesn’t have that. Optimal play requires grinding out every bit of econ from the part of the game that you have mastered, and only bypassing rooms you have trouble with. And during that half an hour of grinding through biome 1 again, you might make one non-trivial build choice.
Both the pacing and difficulty curve are just totally backwards compared what similar games do. It is clearly intentional, but I do not understand why. Nothing about these systems seems good, and they undermine the things that the game does well.
I’m super glad the game doesn’t have any artificial time pressure, that’s one of the reasons I bounced off of Dead Cells. I don’t like these games designed for speed runners.
In regards to the health upgrade, I feel like what you are talking about is a crutch early on for people learning the game, my early runs I did that type of health maximizing but later, and I’ve beat it a few times, I just take the health as I find it to heal up and not overly worry about getting the upgrades.
I haven’t played StS but I played a lot of Hades. They’re basically the same game, except in Hades you choose your weapon before you start the run. IIRC the best charm in Hades is the one that gives you +2% damage for every room you clear without getting hit. So it also rewards perfection. And you’re totally building up your character for that run based on the RNG of the boons (artifacts in Returnal) you find.
Once Returnal clicks you’ll cruise through the first two biomes very fast. Hades doesn’t give you the option to skip levels so you have to do them all. In Returnal, you can skip ahead some, but you’re nerfing yourself if you do so.
I pretty much agree with you about the design of the health system, the backtracking, and the relative lack of interesting build decisions working against the game compared to other roguelikes. But I still wound up loving it overall, on the strength of the combat and atmosphere.
I think exploring thoroughly and finding all of the power-up items is still plenty viable as a strategy there – the time bonuses are more of an optional thing to partially make up for missing a few power-ups and maybe taking extra damage from recklessly rushing through. I appreciate when games do something to at least make “water-finds-a-crack” playstyles not purely optimal in every circumstance.
The developers come from an arcade-gameplay design background. Of course they are going to make a game that is rewarding most of all for doing what is essentially a 1CC, one credit clear.
I’m looking forward to playing this soon. 2022 is my year to get caught up on solo gaming and this is near the top of my list.
I’m surprised a modern AAA designer would allow this. I’m old school and shameless so I’d have no reservations about taking advantage if I needed it.
I guess most games these days restrict backtracking, so you wouldn’t be able to anyway.
That keepsake is not very good (the damage bonuses are additive, not multiplicative so it’s much less powerful than you’d think; and the cost of having to keep the same keepsake for the whole run is pretty high). You’d only take it if perfect damage avoidance is a playstyle you enjoy and want to be rewarded for it / track it, not because it is optimal.
In Returnal, there’s not really anything analogous. All the game mechanical incentives are for conservative perfection, with nothing pushing the player to playstyles that they might enjoy more.
I think it is very different in Returnal, since you’re making very few decisions with a long term impact.
Guns are transfomative, but they come and go constantly. There’s effectively no commitment to any choice there. Artifacts are unambiguously beneficial, but there is very limited agency in which ones you get. Mostly you’ll just take what you’re given by the random drops rather, with not conscious tradeoffs to be made. (The shop will have a few to choose from, and maybe you’ll find one fabricator elsewhere in the level, and then be able to afford a 1-2 of them per biome). So it mostly comes down to the parasites, and they’re rarely transformative.
A full run of Hades is 25 minutes. In Returnal, it feels like it takes that long to reach the shop in the first biome :) I appreciate Returnal giving the option to skip biomes (I never went back to biome 2 after beating the boss). But it still ends up having the same tension as you have within levels: the fun is in learning how to beat the new biome / new enemies / finding the secrets in the new rooms. The gameplay incentives are in grinding through the old ones again.
I guess that’s one strategy. I beat Returnal and I don’t think I ever did this. It’s a difficult game but I honestly had a much harder time with Demon’s Souls.
I began playing a few days ago, did around 12 runs and got more and more used to the combat and the different enemies…had NOT found the sword yet though…although was past the house a few times. Let my kid play who had found the sword and he got to the sword area for my save and then went and just barely beat the first boss.
So, not wanting to use that save, I started over and in two runs, had the sword and fought the boss…lost but I was very close to finishing him off. BUT, I believe since I started a new save and got so far in 2 runs, the game now makes it a lot harder for me to get back to the boss. In my first save file I had 12 runs and even randomized, those areas were easier and easier for me but now there are new areas and they are a lot harder full of more of the tougher enemies so just getting back to the boss is going to be harder.
I never liked Doom 2016 because it was TOO run and gun…but I liken this game to that game in regards to entering new areas and needing to be fast but unlike Doom, you can use parts of the map to escape and rest and some maps you can take your time and not really have to hard core run and gun…a lot more rest between enemy swarms, at least in the first biome area.
I love it.
The game has emergent diffulty scaling?
I dont think so. It’s up to the rng gods.