Game:

Returnal (2021)

Duration: 1:20:32

12 views

0

I finished Act 1 and 2 with zero deaths!

Sorry this video is so dark. I looked for the brightness settings and couldn't find them - you might need to watch this one in the dark.

So, I was getting my butt handed to me by the swimming brutes. Those flung red arrows are nasty when multiple strike - with two malfunctions stacked already, another hit from a red arrow will cause a Critical Malfunction, which destroys collected artifacts (I think I only lost Wound Seekers, which does extra damage when the enemy is below 30% health). Luckily I had a large integrity pool, a good Protection percentage, and healing vials to support me.

I only today realized that malformed enemies with the thick orange health bar cannot be staggered!

Next up, I'll finish my house visits to unlock the sun fragments, and do a quick run through Act 3, find the fragment in each biome, visit the house one last time, kill Ophion again, and get the 'secret' ending - assuming all the biomes are kind enough to spawn the fragment locations for me. After that, I'll do the DLC storyline - I won't bother with an attempted high climb of the Tower.

For those who have never seen this game before, if I would have died a few times, you would have seen the house reset. The additional house visits, and the visions I see when I return after a death, add a little more context to Selene's experiences.

There was a car crash. It seemed her son was in the back seat, and she was unable to save him and save herself too. The house visits will add a bit more context, but it's still very vague whether or not Selene's experiences on Atropos are even real - why is a 20th century house and car in her explorations to the alien planet? Why do some of the Scout Logs recount the kinds of conversations one might have on Earth, at a doctor's office, or in therapy sessions? Why do some of the alien archives show an Astronaut? Why is Ophion's final form an astronaut? Is she in a drugged state, having hallucinations? Is she in a coma? Or near death, resolving her life? Is she in deep depression, escaping into notions of mythology and space travel in order to cope, but still dealing with the intrusions of her real-life trauma? Is she in a deep internal fugue, finding a way to process her trauma, grief and guilt? Or... is her visit to the planet real - and the planet's history is asserting itself upon her, using her experiences to tell its own story to her? How long has she been repeating her returns to the planet - is she the Creator/Destroyer that the xeno writings were referring to? Did she cause the war or the breakdown of their society? Has she been there that long?

Or is the game just using our time spent with it to blur different versions of the truth to keep us engrossed as we become invested, put the game down and come back for another try? (It certainly did that to me).

As the additional house visits will show, there is also something going on between Selene and her mother.

Played on a i7-8700, 16GB 2666 RAM, RTX 3080 10GB LHR, XBox controller

Other Statistics