What if Alex Garland made Metroid?
There is a constant feeling that Returnal is watching you, the world of the game itself reshaping to your actions directly or so alien your 100th run might start out with a cutscene that preys on your psyche as if it knows your playtime, and it taunts you with a reason to keep playing, the strange, truly mysterious story of Selene, and the crash, and the crash, and the crash.
Control was my favorite game of 2019, and boy, does this play like Control met Metroid, and their Video Game Craft smashed into Ridley Scott at the speed of Vanquish, with a story drip-fed-at-random, a thing only games can do- that actually has supernaturality AND substance. There's something special about what Housemarque made with this, especially if you like science fiction, period.
Then, it's one heck of a video-game-as-video-games-do-game, reminding me of the most impossible arcade games, and the failures of Demon's Souls, and finally, a reason to keep playing even when I fail: The breakneck, fast-paced goodness, requiring a fighting game reaction time and a respect asked usually by a FromSoft game, or a classic arcade shooter. But like it's namesake implies, the game is playing along, aware that you will be dying several times, and will throw the best element game can have at you when you least expect it; the element of genuine surprise at random, while slowly making sense of itself, as you master the controls necessary to survive.
The story is vague at first, but there is some incredibly clever, *dread inducing scares, that borrow from everything from MOON to PT, Annihilation, and Metroid, and carves out a new IP that is 0-200 in a matter of seconds. At the same time, the game stays unpredictable, not just because of level shuffling, or RNG, the narrative is nonlinear, and, will blindside you and Selene at the opening of a door, and the weird visions between your deaths manifest into something, nothing, or something totally 'woah'. Long enough a 'woah' you might slip up in the best run you've had- and Returnal doesn't have checkpoints, so, the game constantly asks you to pay intense attention to way more information than a brain can handle at once. To me, that was video games of 2021 at their best, and that is why I give my pick to Returnal, for pushing what we know, and making something that transcends Metroid-Like, and earns it's own bullet hell, vanquish-speed, shooting, slicing, finding something more fascinatingly horrible about your hopeless journey through this biome-and mind-trip of a video game. You don't "explore" on purpose, you RUN and find yourself somewhere less deadly. To play this game is really something else, and goes so hard at being drenched in both demand for your input as it is its own narrative and atmosphere, that in my mind it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, apologizes for nothing, and is one of the most unique video games I have played, even if the concept of a looping, difficult game isn't new.
Housemarque understood the importance of story, particularly how to pace it for a video game, unlike most video games I've ever played- but making the most -return- for your time invested in a game of this type. If you can manage to catch the quick clues as the story unfolds amid the bullet hell mazes of pickups, powerups, mutations and mutators, Silent Hill-ian twists, and nauseating, slow-reveal horror science fiction as-video-games-only can deliver- Returning to Returnal will always be different, mildly surprising, satisfyingly vicious, sometimes straight up scary, visually amazing, and fascinating throughout, and you never exactly know what you're up against; and I really hope to see Housemarque do even more.
