Yeah, every time I see it, I can’t help but think of “Revengeance”.
It’s about time someone did tough woman in a spacesuit well again
OK, so I’ve played a few hours of Returnal (though haven’t beaten the first boss yet), and here are my first impressions.
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Gameplay is very arcadey in the best way. Imagine if Control moved much faster and felt about five times more satisfying to play. A great case study is the melee weapon, which is a giant alien sword that, unlike Control’s slow and ineffectual melee attack, activates in the blink of an eye and does massive damage, but requires you to take on a lot of risk by getting right up in the grill of enemies you’re normally supposed to keep your distance from.
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There are also a bunch of really satisfying little gameplay subsystems. I haven’t played Gears of War, but there’s a great gun reload system that I gather this game cribbed from that series. If you press a button during a specific window of time during your reload, you skip the rest of the animation and get a speed bonus. Feels great.
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Difficulty is just right, reminds me of Souls games. I can already feel myself getting better at it. I played it a bit in the afternoon, and then came back to it late at night, and I noticed that I did much worse when I was tired. To me, this is always a good indicator that a game is asking enough of me.
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The developers have clearly studied the roguelite genre intensively, and there are a lot of familiar design elements here. Rooms where you have to pick one of three rewards, Hades-style powerups that give you a negative restriction you have to pay off, mid-level shops, challenge arena rooms, etc etc etc. They’ve handled permanent upgrades very well, which is to say, they’re extremely rare and when you do get one it’s really meaningful. Rather than trivializing the difficulty, they just give you more options. This is key, because I’ve seen plenty of solid roguelites just throw their game balance out the window by making it easier to play the further you get.
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This game is absolutely gorgeous, definitely the most impressive showcase of the PS5 I’ve seen so far. The first level does owe a HUGE aesthetic debt to H.R. Giger and the Alien movies in a way that’s a little too obvious, but they at least pull it off quite well. They didn’t just copy the pop part of the aesthetic either, there are some actually quite weird sights. From screenshots I’ve seen, it looks like later levels develop their own visual identities outside the Giger aesthetic, so I’m looking forward to that.
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There’s a great sense of mystery, where you’re constantly encountering strange alien artifacts, and you have to take risks to figure out what they do.
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My biggest worry about this game was that its controls would absolutely murder my hands, but so far that hasn’t been the case. They allow you to fully reassign the controls, but I haven’t had to do that. The adaptive trigger controls sound terrible on paper, but they actually do work pretty well. I’ve only had a couple of misclicks when I was first learning the controls. I was very pleased to see that the control settings allow you to just have sprint ALWAYS ON, which is amazing because it means I don’t have to click L3 all the time.
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Plot and writing so far are pretty good. There are audiologs and database entries and shit, but they don’t get in your way. You don’t have to sit around listening to stuff, it just plays smoothly while you keep moving. And they’re pretty rare. There’s actually sort of a Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles vibe to the plot mysteries so far, which I’m digging. It’s really obvious that some of the narrative design people from Control worked on this game, but that is not a bad thing.
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There’s actually a weird genre-bending moment where you’re suddenly in a PT-style first-person horror walking sim kind of situation. It was brief and seemed to be a one-time plot event (which will probably reoccur with variations later on). It was done reasonably well, I didn’t mind it at all.
So yeah, this game rules so far. I’m finding it really compelling and addicting right off the bat. I had to force myself not to stay up all night playing it.
17 Likes
Agreed with all that for the most part although I’m not super fond of the Left Trigger thing/wish it had a bit more resistance since if I’m in a particularly precarious encounter I can’t help but have it pressed in all the way. I think it would’ve made more sense for half pressing LT being the alt-fire instead of vice versa.
4 Likes
Yeah, there is definitely the potential for misclicking it when you’re in the middle of a heated battle. What helps for me is that most of the time I don’t really want to aim down sights anyway. Shooting from the hip seems to be the better choice in most encounters, so I find I don’t even really need to half-press LT unless I’m trying to snipe a monster from across the room.
2 Likes
Have they fixed an issue with a brief delay popping up when coming in and out of the map screen? Otherwise everything I’ve seen looks to confirm its returnality.
returnal remothering
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PS5 only? What the fuck
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it feels like such an obvious reference to that OPN album/song to me that i’m genuinely surprised that they didn’t license that song for the game (or maybe they did and i don’t know?)
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Unraveled really has a great hook but lord the combination of slightly unreliable controls and physics-based platforming and puzzling make it just frustrating enough that I’m bailing out after 4 levels or so.
Also I don’t think your little yarnling really unravels at a constant rate, rather doing so at different rates on a section-by-section basis. That feels a little cheap but I guess it gave the level designers a little more control.
1 Like
i’m happy that this game is good partially because i had a good feeling about it when i saw the trailer and it validates my feelings… but also because it’s made by what was an indie dev team with a very particular area of focus sizing up a lot and getting support from Sony to make an AAA-type release but with a different kind of design focus/approach to what a lot of those games normally have. it feels like something i kind of expected to happen at some point (but hasn’t happened much yet), i.e. bigger companies taking a chance on indie dev teams who are already out there and having them size up to make bigger budget games that still strongly bear the mark of that team’s design approach… as opposed to just throwing a tiny bit of money at them to make “quirky” Goose Game or Annapurna type things.
there are of course plenty of problems that arise from this idea of a smaller developer drastically sizing up to make a larger game. i imagine it must have been hell to make. i also have no intention of ever buying a PS5 but would realllly like to actually play this game so it being an exclusive is a bummer, lmao. but if this game is successful i hope it at least opens the door for other teams like that.
9 Likes
The astonishing thing is that the AAA budget and expectations didn’t dumb down or normify this game at all. It still feels like something personally authored by a small team, except with insane production values. Best of both worlds, I’d say.
5 Likes
that’s been housemarque’s deal for a while wrt sony though, nex machina ruled
it’s more that they cut off a bunch of the other teams they used to prop up this way and this is one of the only remainders, not that their relationship is itself novel
2 Likes
BTW I got to the second level and it does largely ditch the Giger aping, at least in the environmental design. It’s more of a martian desert ruins kind of setting, with a different style of architecture. Nifty!
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i mean i don’t know their exact relationship. Nex Machina was not an exclusive though, right? but what i mean is the era of Sony supporting smaller/experimental developers (at the time Japanese devs) that happened in the PS1/PS2 era (and to some extent the PS3) era has kind of died and it hadn’t really been replaced by anything.
i just think about how everyone loves Dark Souls and whatever but it also feels like no one wants to fund games at that scope that bear the mark of a very specific design sensibility from anyone who isn’t Fromsoftware. eventually something has to give and they’re going to be throwing money at more indie dev companies to make something bigger that they think could develop a fervent following like the Souls games did.
2 Likes
mmm, I have a pretty different read on this, I think you’re overlooking the early PS4 era to a significant degree?
iirc Nex Machina was the first thing they’d tried doing without Sony’s auspices in quite some time and it lost them so much money they tried making a battle royale to get back in the black; this was more of a return home to a newly less experimental Sony than in 2014 when they really were helping indies get off the ground.
I also think the budget of this is probably not too much higher than Nex Machina and the over the shoulder perspective is misleading in that regard if anything – they already demonstrated an ability to write modern shaders and procedural geometry and arcade game loops, this is more of a mild contortion to something that passes as a release window tentpole
anyway everyone play Nex Machina, I thought I was sick of robotron-likes but it’s phenomenal, thanks to @Alterity for that rec
3 Likes
I didn’t notice this until you brought it up, but I think there is a slight delay when opening the map screen, but not when closing it. It’s very subtle though.
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I would put Returnal at a $30m budget; I think games like Alienation were operating at a 5-10m budget. It’s not a big investment for Sony and the fallow period 5 months after launch is ideal timing for a single-A title like this. Newly-conservative Sony will probably consider it a good bet if/only if it can build into a bigger sequel.
4 Likes
I finished Portal Reloaded, and I can safely say it ruled. The writing was extremely tepid and forgettable, which obviously means it wasn’t as good as Portal, but I didn’t go into it expecting good writing.
Instead, it is an extremely good followup to the logic of Portal. By adding a third portal that goes between the future and past, it opens up a whole new set of weird possibilities. I was especially impressed how it didn’t just use this as a light world/dark world mechanic, and instead incorporated momentum and timing into using the time portal quite often.
I also dug the sort of fucked up logic you have to internalize RE: what impact the past has on the future, and vice versa. My favorite thing it has you do a few times is shooting portals in the past to do shit in the future and vice versa. It’s really thoughtful about this, and forces you to truly understand the slightly bizarre interactions at play.
My criticisms are, of course, that the writing is fairly tepid, and it overtutorializes things with voice over. There was also 1 puzzle that I’m convinced I brute forced a solution for because whatever the true solution was, I could not figure it out. Specifically, I ended up doing this dumb-ass loop through past and future 3 times so I could move a box up two ledges, one ledge at a time.
It is not a masterwork like Portal is, but I think it’s a cozy inbetween from Portal’s small-stakes polished gem and Portal 2’s bombastic hollywood blockbuster energy. The fact that it has voice acting at all is impressive, and it’s so tightly designed that I never lost trust that a puzzle was solvable or that I’d put it in some unwinnable state.
I think it really excels in the same way that the first Portal does, which is the full exploration of its mechanics, and the very consistent feeling of “Oh, shit, that hadn’t occurred to me!” It definitely pushes at the edges of making me feel like I broke the game at times.
There’s even an early puzzle that I accidentally solved in a different way than expected, and they fully accounted for that with extra voice lines and a bit of extra level geometry so you can go back to the correct timeline. I thought that was really cool! Let me break more games, plz
Contrast Aperture Tag; The Paint Gun Testing Initiative, which is much, much messier in every way. I enjoyed it as well! But Reloaded is a much tighter experience. I think both are worth playing if you dig Portal.
REally dope that there are two high quality fan games like this. Mods have come a long way!!
10 Likes
Really having an altogether unsatisfying afternoon of videogames here.
Enter the Gungeon – nothing wrong with it really but nothing that compelled me beyond my first run.
Stories: The Path of Destinies – a pile of mechanics, aesthetics, and narrative elements in a trench coat.
Escape Plan – pretty dire. Maybe was a little snappier on its native Playstation Vita but I can’t imagine it was really much better.
5 Likes