Returnal
It’s a little wild that HADES and RETURNAL were released so close to each other.
Both are rogue-likes (i.e. games where deaths reset your progress, and you have to iteratively explore a changing world), both are heavily inspired by Ancient Greek mythology, both are fast-paced action games…hell, both of them feature feisty protagonists with short hair and heterochromia.
HADES (2020, from the animated trailer)
RETURNAL (2021)
Both are not only excellent games, they are excellent in ways that are specific to games when compared to media that are generally consumed more passively, like TV and movies. Challenge is central to HADES and RETURNAL, and the experience of understanding and overcoming that challenge is at the heart of what makes these games great. Few games feel as good to “beat” as these two do.
But despite these similarities, the two games couldn’t be any more different from each other. In terms of mechanics, aesthetics, and storytelling, HADES and RETURNAL diverge drastically.
Which leads to one boast that distinguishes RETURNAL: it actually manages to get out from HADES’ considerable shadow, and stand on its own.
So today I want to talk about RETURNAL. I want to explain where it shines and where it fumbles, but I especially want to try to highlight what specifically sets it apart from other similar games.
Shmoovin’
Moving around in this game feels so goo-
Wait, hold on a sec.
There we go.
Moving around in this game feels so goddamn good.
Specifically: Movement during combat has a very satisfying fluidity, once you get comfortable with it.
Contrary to many players’ normal instincts when the game floods you with enemy projectiles, the answer isn’t to hunker down and take stock of the situation but to keep moving. Similar to the combat in games like CONTROL, no place is safe for long - so you’re better off dancing around the arena, while constantly applying pressure to your foes.
This is reinforced by the clever design of several early enemies. The mycomorph throws a glob of sticky goo at your feet that does no damage, but makes you walk/run slower - immediately indicating that staying put is a bad thing - and the fastest way to get unstuck is to jump out of the goo and air-dash beyond its radius. The shielded turrets that spawn far away from you need to be destroyed by an up-close melee attack, but the charge-up time for their guns is usually just long enough for you to make it to them and hit them first if you just run right for them. Even the intimidating kerberonyx teaches you a valuable nuance here. It fires a stream of projectiles that chases you, and lasts a surprisingly long time - long enough that if you try to dash out of its path, you’ll probably get hit by it in that split second after a dash when you’ve momentarily stopped running. The lesson? You don’t always need to get fancy - sometimes you just gotta keep running and you’ll be fine.
At the same time, almost nothing interrupts your control of your character. You can run, jump, dodge, and dash all while aiming and firing your weapon continuously. Even during your reload animations, there’s a timed prompt you can hit to finish reloading faster.
When RETURNAL is at its best, you do not stop moving. Boss fights and challenge rooms become these balletic battles where there’s constantly something to react to - a reload prompt to hit, a melee attack to dodge, an incoming wave of projectiles to position yourself for - and it’s simultaneously overwhelming and encouraging. Part of the key to this balance is that everything is brightly and loudly telegraphed. Lasers hum in crescendo Death-Star-style as they get ready to fire, projectiles are almost always the brightest things on the screen, and different attacks are color-coded to help you keep track of them. It’s a little bit like DARK SOULS meets GUITAR HERO: there’s a lot coming at you, but you can always see it coming.
These fights are so cool that I find myself often going out of my way to challenge bosses, even when I really shouldn’t, even when the safer thing would be to just move on to the next level.
Tons of other games try to achieve this feeling of flow during combat, where it feels both propulsive and precarious. It reminds me a bit of the best bosses in games like SEKIRO or DARK SOULS 3 or ELDEN RING, where the first thing I want to do immediately after fighting them (whether I won or died) is fight them again. But since everything gets compared to Souls-likes these days (did you know that the final boss of POKÉMON LEGENDS: ARCEUS is all about dodge rolls? I guess ARCEUS is the DARK SOULS of Pokémon!), let’s pick a different example.
The next comparisons that come to mind are the Batman titles produced by Rocksteady Games like BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY, as well as their spiritual successor, 2018’s SPIDER-MAN developed by Insomniac Games. Like RETURNAL, these games swarm you with groups of enemies attacking in different ways, and constantly provide prompts to dodge/counter/block incoming attacks. As you continue to take out enemies without getting hit, you build up escalating buffs that increase your speed and damage. At high combo counts, you bounce around the room dropping goons like a ping pong wrecking ball. But when you do get hit in ARKHAM CITY or SPIDER-MAN, all that momentum vanishes. Suddenly you’re much slower, your attacks have much less stopping power, and there’s a good chance your first few actions immediately post-getting-hit are purely defensive as you try to avoid the next attacks that are about to land.
Combat in RETURNAL almost never suffers from that loss of momentum. Most hits from enemies don’t even interrupt your attacks, and even fewer slow you down. You can keep on shmoovin’ right into your grave, as I’ve done many a time when I was having so much fun with the combat that I failed to notice I was getting my ass kicked.
(That’s a good thing, by the way. It’s important for playing a game to feel good even when you’re dying, especially for a game like RETURNAL where you are expected to die frequently.)
Often, the most frustrating enemies in the game are those rare few whose attacks do stagger you. They tend to be particularly dangerous enemies, like minibosses that can melt you in just a few seconds of panic, but it’s the fact that they can actually halt you for even a moment that makes them feel really mean.
The speed and fluidity of movement feels particularly helpful for a rogue-like. Dying at the end of long run is always discouraging, but that discouragement gets amplified when it takes longer to spin up the next run.
For example, look at SLAY THE SPIRE. It’s also an excellent game. But after you die, you get sent back to the title screen. You have to pick a game mode, then a character, then your starting boon, and then you start slogging through the first area again, gradually hoping to pick up the pieces to make your clunky starting deck begin to take off again. That’s a lot of spin-up time to get shmooving post-death.
SLAY THE SPIRE (2017)
In RETURNAL, after you die, you get a pair of brief cutscenes and you’re immediately back in it. Unlike SLAY THE SPIRE, combat is satisfying even with your starting gear, so the beginning of each run doesn’t feel as much like wearing lead shoes. And RETURNAL even lets you choose to skip bosses, and eventually entire levels, once you’ve beaten them - so you can either grind up for more gear and buffs, or just race right towards the last thing that killed you.
Just seconds after death, you’re already abandoning your crashed ship and running right into the first room full of enemies.
Yes, there’s a bit of the “argh ok ok one more try one more” phenomenon in any given rogue-like, and I’ll admit that I’m particularly susceptible to tilt-induced retry-addiction - but even so, I think that the mostly frictionless start-of-run flow and the fluid movement speed in RETURNAL combine to give you a sort of momentum that not every rogue-like has.
And this momentum is encouraging.
It feels like the world can’t stop you, only kill you. And that’s not enough.
Disco inferno
As you might expect for a big-budget title that headlines a new console generation, RETURNAL is a very pretty game. Prettiness is definitely one of the draws of RETURNAL.
Now, I’m not talking about the way it screams “Look at my particle effects!” from time to time.
(The teleportation animation in particular is so needlessly extra that it looks like something from a demo reel for the latest Nvidia GigaForce Warrantee Melter 9000 graphics card. It kinda cracks me up each time I see it, but if this looks cool to you, then RETURNAL’s got you covered.)
I’m not even talking about the near-photorealism of some of its cinematics, or the way it hides its loading times for a virtually seamless experience - though those certainly don’t hurt.
I mean that RETURNAL is pretty in the same way that bullet hell games like IKARUGA have been pretty for decades.
Bullet hell is a subgenre of shoot-’em-up/shmup/STG games famous for absolutely filling the screen with enemy projectiles. They started showing up some time in the 1990s, presumably to fill a desire for fans of shmups to get a more challenging experience (the subgenre name is meant to refer to their purported difficulty). When my friends and I played IKARUGA as kids, I remember us calling it “ninja training”, and joking that if you could beat the game you’d be able to “hear air”.
IKARUGA (2001, but this screenshot is from the 2003 GameCube port)
But bullet hells swiftly developed another distinctive focus: aesthetics. The bullets filling the screens tended more and more to be arranged in floridly symmetrical patterns, and this has become the single most consistent visual element across a genre whose games are just as likely to feature spaceships as anime schoolgirls.
This aesthetic trend also changed the nature of the challenge provided by these games. Traditional shmups tested your reaction time: can you move out of the way/shoot down the incoming enemies fast enough? That’s why filling the screen with bullets intuitively seems impossible - there’s just too many things to react to, right?
Well, yes. You’re not reacting to each projectile on its own anymore; you’re reacting to the overall arrangement of them. Bullet hells aren’t just about reaction time, they’re also heavily about pattern navigation. This is a big part of why fans refer to some bullet hells as “puzzle shooters”: succeeding in combat often comes down to finding the “solution” to the enemy’s attack pattern, which is visualized all over the screen. A curtain of bullets looks impressive, but only the ones near you actually matter - the rest are there to illustrate the pattern.
Over the years, there have been tons of inventive spins on bullet hell conventions. UNDERTALE and DELTARUNE mix bullet hell into turn-based RPGs. GODSTRIKE adds a timer and makes that your health - when the timer runs out, the next hit kills you. And TOUHOU BUNKACHU ~ SHOOT THE BULLET isn’t even a shooter at all. You respond to the waves of projectiles by taking a photo of the screen, getting points for how pretty they are (and how imperiled you were when you took the photo).
Despite this, there have been very few truly 3D bullet hells. The closest things I could find are some sections from a fan game called TOUHOU MECHANICAL SCROLLERY, some parts of certain boss fights in NIER: AUTOMATA…and RETURNAL.
NIER: AUTOMATA (2017)
RETURNAL (2021)
It was visuals like these that got me interested in the game in the first place.
RETURNAL isn’t strictly a bullet hell. At times, it plays more like a conventional third-person shooter. At other times, it emphasizes twitchy reaction speed above all else - enemy AI isn’t locked into patterns regardless of your movements the way it often is in “true” bullet hells.
But it has a lot of bullet hell DNA. The very first enemy you meet doesn’t fire projectiles directly at you; it sprays an arc of slow-moving glowing orbs just to the side of you. But the arc widens as it moves across the room, and some of those will hit you if you just stay still. Thus, RETURNAL introduces the concept of “pay attention to the pattern of bullets, and navigate around where they will end up” from the start of the very first combat encounter. Throughout the game, several enemies attack you this way - not by gunning right for you, but by crowding you with moving hazards you need to maneuver through.
And then there are the boss battles. Just like in the best bullet hells, these fights are intimidating and undeniably satisfying.
On the surface, they just look great. Almost all boss attacks either move just slowly enough or pause just long enough for you to appreciate their mandala-like patterns before you need to react to them. The neon projectiles shine in stark contrast to the dark and gritty backdrop of the rest of the game, as if to explain to you that combat itself is what’s beautiful about the world of RETURNAL. And the spacious arenas in which these battles take place only further emphasize the spectacle.
I think part of why these moments are so fun is that the elements that make them feel overwhelming are the same ones that give you traction in the fight itself. These visual spectacles help you understand the pattern you need to navigate, while making it feel more impressive and rewarding when you do slip through it. A 2013 video from the PBS Idea Channel suggested that bullet hell games could actually be meditative, or at least mirror some aspects of meditative techniques, by making the player react to the overall pattern of gameplay - and pushing their reaction time just to the threshold where it feels like they’re not trying, just flowing.
This video reminded of Hbomberguy’s description of what it feels like in games like DARK SOULS when things start to click:
“You stop doing the maths about how quickly your attack goes off and trying to figure out an opening, and you start to just know the right time, because all this stuff is so deep in your head that you don’t even have to think about it. It becomes like an instinct. [...] The enjoyable thing about these games is when all these things are so engrained that the mechanics themselves seem to fade away, and you’re fully transported into the salvietic nightmare of sound and sight.”
Like I said before, I do think there’s some strong parallels between the feeling of overcoming a boss in DARK SOULS and in RETURNAL. What I think the bullet hell elements bring to that experience is the aesthetics of that challenge. It visualizes the puzzle before you in a more direct way, and solving it feels more like participating directly in the prettiness on-screen.
What’s being described here isn’t some world-record-speedrunner tier of transcendent skill, just to be clear. I’m pretty terrible at these games (I still haven’t beaten IKARUGA without infinite lives), and I still get to experience this satisfying flow state when playing them. People often talk about “difficult games” like taking shots of hot sauce - something deliberately unpleasant, with no point other than to say you’ve done it - but that’s not how these games are built. The challenges built into IKARUGA and SEKIRO and RETURNAL aren’t an attempt to thwart the player; they are part of an overall experience designed to help you achieve a satisfying feeling of mastery over the game, at a variety of skill levels.
Of course, it takes some getting there. There is no way to design a challenge that doesn’t frustrate people at least some amount of the time. You’re gonna die, and you’re gonna have to pick yourself up out of the mud and try again, a lot.
But then, that’s what the game’s about.
In a mirror, darkly
In RETURNAL, you play as a space scout named Selene. While chasing a mysterious signal called the “White Shadow”, Selene crash-lands on an alien planet. She soon discovers that when she dies, some force re-creates her back at the site of her crash.
As Selene explores the alien world, she comes across the ruins of a fallen civilization, and begins to piece together what happened to them. She also comes across her own corpses, sometimes accompanied by audio recordings left by another version of her before she died. Often, these recordings serve as tutorials. Other times, they elaborate the story of the game, by sharing more of Selene’s inner dialog, explaining her interpretations of the world around her.
Sometimes, they are unhinged. One recording rambles about “divine punishment,” “ascension,” and “the transcendent watcher in the deep below.”
“I alone am worthy,” raves the Selene in the recording.
“What happened to…her?” mutters the Selene we control. “That was not me.”
For most of the game, this is the line between metaphor and reality. Cutscenes, audio logs, and visions might be confusing - but the world you explore and shoot things in is concrete. Things are explainable.
As the game goes on, though, that line erodes. The Selene you control sounds more like the Selene in the audio logs. Metaphor intrudes on reality. And the images and sounds from your visions start to haunt you outside your head. A song you heard on the radio. A child’s toy. An old astronaut suit.
It’s pretty surprising (and kinda refreshing) for a game with as much production value and mainstream appeal as RETURNAL to be so deliberately opaque and poetic. There are written passages in the game that feel as challenging to pick apart as some of its boss battles. It’s the kind of game that occasionally has me looking up obscure Pelasgian mythology to try to figure out the additional meaning behind enemy and character names. I usually think of RETURNAL as an action rogue-like, but it could also accurately be called an art horror game. Or even a…psychological shooter? It’s weird in some fairly bold ways for its market (i.e. high-profile near-launch titles for a new console), and it makes some striking choices that I’m going out of my way not to even hint at here.
This progression from concreteness to metaphor emphasizes one of the general themes of RETURNAL: degradation. Selene’s journey is a spiral, and the more of her own corpses she pushes past the harder it becomes to keep things in a neat, causal order - and this confusion makes “progression” feel almost indistinguishable from “falling apart”.
Unfortunately, players experience this spiral in some ways that are less than ideal.
The final level, in particular, feels like the low point of the game.
It’s pretty common for games to “take away your toys” in their last levels, by confronting you with enemies/obstacles that counter strategies you had relied on until that point. If you’re used to knocking down enemies with headshots, a game might throw you some foes wearing helmets. If you’re used to stealth kills, it might give you some brawlers to fight in wide-open and well-lit arenas. You get the idea. But there’s a balance that needs to be struck here between “advancing the challenge” and “undermining what makes the game fun”. And I think a handful of design choices in RETURNAL’s last level push it more towards the latter.
In the final level, your movement becomes floaty and clumsy. At the same time, the rooms you’re in are full of bottomless pits to avoid. Combined, these two factors hobble the ultra-fluid movement I was extolling before: your sprinting around the arena gets interrupted by sliding into a hole pretty often, and the added slipperiness of your controls makes it feel less like the game is trying to test your precision and more like it’s telling you to slow down - in direct opposition to what had been making the game great up until that point.
This level raises the difficulty by being less like a bullet hell. While there are still curtains of projectiles from time to time, evading them often feels less about “solving the puzzle” and more about managing your new controls. Platforming often becomes more important than pattern navigation, as you’re trying to avoid falling into pits while figuring out where to go and where the enemies are. And one particular type of enemy that’s common in this zone has a habit of flying at you swiftly from waaay off-screen - emphasizing reaction speed much more heavily while downplaying pattern navigation even further (because you don’t see the pattern coming).
In a way, this level highlights some of the challenges of making a fully 3D bullet hell, such as the added difficulty in being able to see the whole pattern and read it accurately while the player simultaneously controls the limited camera and moves around in the space. Unfortunately, it mostly shows you how the earlier parts of the game handled these challenges better.
The problem I had with the final level isn’t that it was “unfair” or “too hard”, really. The problem is that it feels more like switching gears than cranking up the difficulty. The mechanics and enemy designs in this part of the game are (mostly) defensible in a vacuum, and they’re reasonable choices to test the player’s mastery at the end of a fast-paced third-person shooter. But it’s a little disappointing, and a little frustrating, that the final stretch of RETURNAL emphasizes the things it has in common with other games rather than the things that make RETURNAL stand out.
A lot of this - the downward spiral, the trudging progression, struggling to hold your ground - is probably intentional.
While HADES is about rising, RETURNAL is about sinking.
The culminating moments in HADES feel triumphant, and the reward for breaking through its challenges are moving emotional climaxes. Fans of HADES make fan art of the game set to cathartic lyrics like “I’m gonna make it through this year if it kills me”.
You don’t really see any RETURNAL fanart like that. On the other side of each breakthrough in RETURNAL are breadcrumbs, an inward spiral of reflection, and the growing realization of how all the moments in your past led, inexorably, to all the moments in your future. There’s a reason the game’s tag line is “Break the cycle.” It’s not optimistic. It’s desperate.
This isn’t a bad choice. It is, in its own ways, an equally powerful message, and equally well-communicated by the game’s story and mechanics. The themes of RETURNAL are crafted artfully and with intent.
But the biggest risk when you’re trying to convey a feeling of despair, of circling-the-drain instead of making progress, is that you succeed a bit too much.
Alongside some frustrating mechanics and design choices towards the end, the increasing metaphorization of RETURNAL’s story adds to the feeling of struggling to get a solid foothold, and can lead to a general motivational drain. The final level has its moments, but I definitely had to drag my feet across the finish line there.
Fortunately, the reward is suitably cool.
The final boss rocks in all the ways the other bosses rock, and the “ending” gives you some answers and even more questions. Even after you’ve done it all, RETURNAL still refuses to give up all its secrets. That might be annoying if you were expecting a more traditional tying-everything-up-with-a-bow conclusion, but it’s endearing - maybe even captivating - if you can accept RETURNAL for what it is.
In a lot of ways, the fact that RETURNAL is a rogue-like helps save it from the doldrums of its final chapter. After all, rogue-likes aren’t about ending. (At least, not the current generation of endless-play rogue-likes.) Even if you find yourself struggling like I did to get through that last level, you’re not stuck entirely in that level. Being forced to “start over” after each death means you get to re-experience the parts of the game you enjoy the most, whenever you want. You can beeline to the final level, or you can explore every nook and cranny of the previous ones, hoping to amass enough upgrades and buffs to be able to finally crest that hill.
Although I’ve spent a few hundred words harping on the game’s shortcomings, the fact that the silver lining on the final chunk is “at least you get to play the rest of it over and over again” should emphasize just how solid the rest of the game, and even the game as a whole, still is.
RETURNAL is a game about perpetual motion, and I’ll probably always have some appetite to pick up the controller, wake up from my crashed ship, and just start running again.
Just watch your step in that last bit.
