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Returnal (PS5)

Started by BojackHorsefella, May 01, 2021, 02:18:03 PM

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BojackHorsefella

Anyone pick it up? Played it about two hours on release day, I'd describe it as Dead Space meets Hades. Very challenging but enjoying it so far.

Crewe

Quote from: BojackHorsefella on May 01, 2021, 02:18:03 PM
Anyone pick it up? Played it about two hours on release day, I'd describe it as Dead Space meets Hades. Very challenging but enjoying it so far.

this means nothing to me lol can you clarify?

BojackHorsefella

Quote from: Crewe on May 02, 2021, 12:18:49 AM
Quote from: BojackHorsefella on May 01, 2021, 02:18:03 PM
Anyone pick it up? Played it about two hours on release day, I'd describe it as Dead Space meets Hades. Very challenging but enjoying it so far.

this means nothing to me lol can you clarify?


Hahaha, sure.

So, Hades is a roguelike that kind of set a new standard for roguelike games this year. You may've seen games in the past such as Risk of Rain 1 or 2, or Rogue Legacy, which fall under the roguelike category. Basically, you have "1 run" to beat the game, otherwise you start all the way back at the beginning, but typically there's some form of permanent upgrade you can utilize to make successive "runs" easier, and in Hades there's even a story element that basically requires you to make run after run after run to progress.

In Rogue Legacy, you'd respawn as an "heir" of your last adventurer, and can use whatever gold and XP you gained in your previous run through the castle to upgrade certain skills or your total HP or MP.

In Hades, your goal is to escape from Hades by running through 3 areas: Tartarus, Asphodel and Elysium in a bid to escape from Hades (you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades himself). Death is a part of the game in roguelikes instead of an actual fail-state, and never is that more apparent than in Hades, where if you die, you return to the main hall of Hades to your father's (and other's observation), or where
Spoiler
even if you escape Hades, you learn Zagreus can't survive in the mortal world, and thus you die just to return to, you guessed it, Hades.

I'm using these two main examples as I'm still learning Returnal's own systems, but it's very similar. The game starts with you crash landing on an alien planet, it isn't long before you find your own dead body on the planet, and begin to discover you're in a time loop that resets every time you die. There are some permanent upgrades, and some items that carry over from run to run to help alleviate some of the difficulty, but Returnal is a more punishing game than the other two, with a tone and atmosphere more befitting of the earlier Dead Space games, a horror franchise also set in outerspace.

I know in Returnal initially there are 3 biomes: a forest, I think a swamp and then a desert (I haven't made it out of the first biome yet). I also know eventually you unlock 3 more beyond that, but the concept is the same: try to escape the time loop by completing runs. Each of these games also have their own weapon systems and mid-game powerups/debuffs (in Returnal, this comes in the form of making a choice of picking up either "parasites," which specifically tell you what they're boosting and what they're draining during a run, or "malignant items," which are items that also grant buffs, but may cause your suit to malfunction in some way unless you can clean the malignancy with some ether).

Gameplay-wise, Returnal is third person, and makes incredible use of the dual sense controller to both build atmosphere, but also allow for some interesting gunplay via the haptic feedback.

The main knock on the game right now is there's no save feature, which is fine story-wise, because essentially it saves every time you die (there IS a story, progress is mostly locked behind your own success), but as the game goes on and your skill improves, theoretically runs start taking longer and longer, and the no-save issue becomes a problem as you find yourselves 3 hours into a game and still needing to fight the final boss. The game developer has said "Just put your PS5 in rest mode," which, sure, is A solution, although doesn't account for automatic updates or your console just plain shutting off, but this hasn't been a problem for me yet as I haven't had a run go over an hour.

Crewe

damn, that sounds like its too much for me lol
No save? How is that even possible today? If I spent a few hours only to get kicked back to the start, my controller would be through the tv