RETURNAL: Full Preview Details For Ambitious New 3rd Person Shooter For PS5

written by Jih-Wei Peng

Returnal is not, at first glance, the kind of game you’d imagine Housemarque to be making.

The PS5 reveal event included, among other things, a trailer for Returnal, which introduced us to a lone astronaut stuck on an alien planet and forced to relieve her crashing and dying upon it, over and over again, her memories and thoughts steadily becoming more twisted and gruesome with every death, the planet worming its way into her being and possibly vice versa, her only hope of maintaining her sanity being to somehow push through and solve the mystery at the heart of the planet. It’s all very dark, atmospheric, and brooding, and for most of the trailer, I would have assumed I was looking at a horror game.

And then the gameplay section of the trailer kicked in.

Once you learn who Housemarque is, though, things begin to make more sense. The oldest commercial game developer in Finland, Housemarque made a name for themselves as dedicated arcade designers with titles such as Super Stardust, Resogun, Nex Machina, and Matterfall. Characterized by fast, frenetic action and neon-bright particle effects and explosions in all directions, their games gained critical acclaim but ultimately in recent years failed to sell well, as the devs themselves announced in a blog post titled “Arcade is dead,” noting that “the industry is moving more toward multiplayer experiences with strong, robust communities.” They put action to words by announcing Stormdivers, a battle royale shooter livened up with special power and abilities, but that got put on hold early this year as they shifted their efforts to a then-unnamed AAA project, “their most ambitious yet.”

We now know that they were talking about Returnal, but even if their graphics and storytelling are reaching for AAA quality, it’s also clear that they’re not-so-subtly taking their arcade heritage with them. The trailer features the same flashy, colorful particle effects as can be seen in their arcade games, some enemy attacks even taking on the same bullet hell geometric patterns of their past games, while the protagonist’s movements have the same light, twitchy feeling often found in arcade games, with the kind of rapid side dashes so common in their previous works. Looking through their snippets of gameplay it’s not hard to walk away feeling like Returnal is their attempt to sneak in arcade design into an AAA shooter under the cover of roguelikes.

Which, honestly, doesn’t exactly sound like the worst of all possible futures to me. Even if they’re trying to break into AAA games, Housemarque’s traditional strength lies in their arcade design and aesthetics, and it’s a sound plan to try and play to their strengths as much as possible even while moving in a new direction. Besides, the idea of a third-person arcade shooter isn’t one that’s been explored all that often in recent years – shooters tend to lean towards realism and weight, and the idea of dropping that to go all-in on the dopamine rush of hypermobility and color explosions is one well worth diving into.

From the looks of it, they’ve even managed to incorporate how easy it is to die in arcade games into the plot proper. The time loop and planet-shifting plot point mentioned in the trailer is almost certainly pointing at a roguelike mechanic complete with randomized dungeons, making death by bullet hell less punishing and hopefully more rewarding over time.

The trailer, for instance, showcased multiple gun types, holding open the possibility of some kind of weapons collection system, and while they only demonstrated one notable ability (dashing), if Stormdivers was any indication it may well be possible to unlock even more interesting movement-based abilities – teleportation, shield-summoning, invisibility, etc. etc, which would certainly give you more of a compelling reason to try again after death than getting a high score.

The wrinkle in all this, however, is how well such gameplay would mesh with what seems to be a very serious and po-faced story. Going from what feels like psychological horror to dash-dodging giant waves of purple glowy balls gives something of a sense of tonal whiplash, and while their arcade design skills may be well-established their storytelling isn’t yet (the plot is Resogun is almost in its entirety, “Save all humans.”). Whether they have the writing chops to tell a story of psychological breakdown AND to square that story with the colorful combat remains to be seen.

But even if the story ends up being so much fluff, Housemarque still has a strong tradition of core gameplay to fall back on, and with any luck, they’ll be able to translate arcade aesthetics into a new genre, a new generation, and a new dimension, which if successful may very well end up giving arcade games a second lease on life. Given their love of the genre and the reluctance with which they declared that arcade games were dead, that’d be an outcome to warm the hearts of the devs. Here’s hoping for their success!