Game:

Returnal (2021)

Duration: 46:01

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2

I created a new user on my PS5 and started Returnal again from scratch.

Unfortunately, I suffered 3 deaths in biome 5, but those were my only deaths. I also wasted 2 hours trying to find sun fragments in Act 3, wondering if my game was broken. It turns out I hadn't seen all of the house sequences yet, so the sun fragments weren't spawning yet. You have to see the last house sequence in biome 4 AND have defeated Ophion once before the sun fragments will spawn. In all, it took me 12 hours and 11 minutes with 3 deaths to finish everything, when it should have taken around 8 hours and 30 minutes. Originally, it took me 59 hours with 115 deaths.

So, I won't bother uploading that full playthrough. Instead, here are the highlights of Acts 1 and 2. I got a particularly cruel boss spawn in Biome 5, and I'll say the later game is a LOT easier with all of the decent tier 3 weapon unlocks, which I didn't have here. In this playthrough, I unlocked around 30 weapon traits out of 270, and got 3 of them to tier 2, and that's it.

Chapters:
0:00 Biome 1 - Evading the common scripted death
0:50 Brute and zombie fight in the field
1:58 Biome 1 boss, Phrike
6:03 Biome 2 - First turtle fight
6:55 First Severed fight
7:52 Biome 2 challenge room
10:42 Biome 2 boss, Ixion
16:17 Biome 3 - 3 Severed
17:40 Room fight before Nemesis
20:27 Biome 3 boss, Nemesis
24:20 Biome 4 challenge room
26:33 Biome 4 key guard
27:37 Biome 4 boss, Hyperion
32:00 Biome 5 challenge room
35:43 Biome 5 nasty key guard fight
37:29 Biome 5 last key guard
38:32 Biome 6 Visor guard - malformed water brute
39:47 Descent to fight room
41:29 Fight before Abyssal Key
42:15 Abyssal key guard
43:27 Biome 6 boss, Ophion with Carbine

Still, I enjoyed this fresh playthrough - I forgot how initial lore was presented to me. In a few months, when I miss the game again, I'll try a fresh playthrough again and see how that recording goes.

I went into most rooms, but didn't bother with challenge rooms when I was in dire straits on health and supplies (skipped the challenge rooms in biomes 3 and 6 - I forgot the challenge room in biome 1).

PS5's Share Factory does the job ok enough, but it refuses to burn files longer than an hour. You can't even load clips for editing that go much longer than that even though you plan to cut them down (the app forces them to 10 seconds, and you have to use Trim to lengthen them selectively as you continue editing the final video together). And I couldn't transfer the result to my main account on the PS5 for upload, nor could I use the same PS Plus login as my main. So I copied the resulting file to a USB stick and I'm uploaded it from my PC.

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