Returnal (2021)

I am only about 1-2 hours in but I love the vibe and the mood this game puts down. The game has you discover basically everything on your way with very little explained in the opening cutscene.

Ultimately I don’t know that I have the skill and persistence to make it through all the way but I hope I can make enough progress a bit in uncovering more of the mystery.

It feels especially good to down two bosses in two days, especially after returning to play yesterday for the first time in a few weeks thanks to FH5.

Now it’s off to The Fractured Wastes. I’m trying to avoid guides so that I can avoid knowing how far into the game I am.

Update: a couple runs into The Fractured Wastes and it feels like Returnal put it's big-kid pants on. Some of these new enemies are relentless, including an upgrade to my least favourite enemy from The Crimson Wastes, The Severed and these little flying robot jerks I hated from The Citadel. It's amazing what a dumb little drone can do when there's eight of them attacking you while you're also trying to fight off multiple Severed.

I'm struggling with Returnal on two fronts.

First, the legibility of the world felt terrific at first but I'm now struggling to see things that should be obvious (enemies, ramps, power-ups, some UI text, etc.). I've tried changing visual settings, adjusting lights to eliminate all glare on the screen, put a chair smack in the middle of the room staring directly at it. But with all that, I still feel disconnected. The sound is fairly immersive, but visually I'm pining to play in VR. Even if it was still in 3rd person, I feel like a wider FOV and the stereoscopic depth would help me track things better. I haven't struggled with this before, so I'm not sure if it's the fact I'm now 36 and things are getting harder for me or something else. I'm going to press on but I was not expecting to feel this.

Second, I'm absolutely swimming in game mechanics I do not yet understand them. Once I've overcome this obstacle, I'll likely reminisce on how fun it was to learn how to effectively manage sub systems, min/max stats, and improve my chances against the RNG gods. But now, I'm laying down in a...machine?...thing?...and it takes most of my health and does...something? And then I die and the game invites me to stop playing, so I do.

Game crashed on me today when I had a really solid run going into biome 6. I heard this game had some issues with crashes when it first launched but I know there's been a few patches since then, and in my roughly 40 hours of playing this is the first major issue I've run into but... it still sucks lol. This was the first really promising run I'd had in a while, I had some really good artefacts/parasites and managed to find a pretty tasty hollowseeker that was melting most enemies, but none of that really matters if the game just decides to say "no :)" as it turns out.

I'm still determined to beat this game so I'm definitely gonna jump back in once I stop crying about losing this run lol, but there is nothing more frustrating than a game crashing on you out of nowhere- especially in a game like this where you lose a couple hours of gameplay because of it and essentially have to start from scratch on a new run. It's just once a game crashes like that it'll stay in the back of my mind and I'll worry about it crashing again and it really puts me off. Like imagine that happening during the final phase of the final boss. I don't think I would recover from that I would simply lie down and give up.

But that didn't happen, and I'm obviously gonna go play it again; I just wanted to sit here and grump about it for a minute I guess 😅

haha eldritch nightmare go brrr

I don't think I'm gonna last too long in biome 2 after this fight, but at this point I'm just happy to be here :') I hope I can start finding some new weapons now because getting the same 3 on loop is starting to wear thin lol. I'll soon find out I guess, I'm excited to see what's next!