Okay I'm spoiling this game and there's nothing you can do to stop me I imagine, for a lot of people, Returnal feels like hell. Do you know how health works in Returnal? Let me tell you.
You have a health bar. It’s here. When you’re damaged, from a monster’s smack, or a collision with the projectiles filling the screen, or by falling off a cliff, you lose health.
A sizable chunk of it. Don’t worry though, you can increase your health! How?
Well. Throughout each world, there are a few health pickups, these little green blips. If you have previously been smacked or hit or fallen, they’ll give you back some of your missing health.
However, if you’re not hurt in any way, those same green blips will increase your health bar instead. In other words, if you’re struggling with the game, if you’re frequently losing health from the countless dangers you’re up against, you will be stuck with a relatively miniscule life bar for the whole experience. It’s only when you’re excelling, in fact only when you’ve proven that you don’t really need health, that the game rewards you with more of it.
Returnal is also a roguelike, where dying at any point brings you back to the beginning again. Returnal is a roguelike which has a first level so difficult I’ve talked to many people who have never beat the first boss. Which means that, for those people, Returnal is exclusively this dark forest, pouring rains, alien wolves and tentacles and dying and dying and dying again.
And look, I know it’s video essay 101 to take a frustrating part of a game and say “this is why it’s good, actually. ” We’ve all heard someone talk about Dark Souls before, I’ve been that person before. I don’t want to do that here- if you’re one of those people still stuck in that first level, that sucks!
I don’t think it’s good that you’re trapped there. I wish there was a way I could give you the same experience I had with the game. Because Returnal, for me, was one of the most impactful gaming experiences I had in the last year.
It’s a game I want to tell everyone about. And oddly enough, my explanation of why it’s amazing has a lot in common with why folks might have fallen off it so hard. It’s a game where you can’t get out of hell.
Let’s talk through the basics. You’re an astronaut named Selene, and when the game starts, you’re tracing some sort of “forbidden signal” called “white shadow. ” It leads you and her to a planet far from Earth, but as Selene descends onto the alien and seemingly undeveloped planet, her spaceship is struck by something, she loses control, plummets out of the sky, and crash lands in a rainy forest.
With no other option, she abandons Helios, her wrecked ship, and starts to explore the new world she’s trapped on. As becomes immediately apparent, the world isn’t “undeveloped-” it’s simply in ruin. In that first endless rain, each new room is some new combination of crumbling walkways, overgrown corridors, and massive statues soon to become trunkless legs of stone.
Almost every new door means a new confrontation with the hostile fauna. Everything has tentacles, and you shoot all of it. Brutes covered in writhing masses, flying squids with bulbous blue heads.
And yet sometimes you open a door and instead of a hail of projectiles, you’re met with something more inexplicable. A black orb, made of something Selene calls ichor, sits suspended over a chasm and repeatedly denies your attempts to destroy it. A hall of what seem like memories, thousands of particles that rush together to form holograms of the alien race that died long before you crash landed.
And in the middle of this forest, built into the rock itself, an early 20th century farmhouse, the paint peeling, the porch decaying, but nevertheless weathering the endless rain. A little later, you’ll find the key to the house. You can go inside.
Outside, on the surface, you’ve likely discovered the planet’s trick by now- death is forbidden. Every failed attempt to get out of the forest brings you back to the crash site, every time Selene disappears down a bottomless pit or falls under the claws of some beast, she wakes up again at the crash site, choking, still with the memory of each new denied death. Even more disturbingly, this cycle physically manifests itself in the world; you will repeatedly run across your own body, lifeless on the ground, usually in proximity to a new extra-dangerous creature.
And this immediately begs the question of what kind of endless loop this is, because unlike the time loops we’re more accustomed to, the day doesn’t seem to be starting over. Time still progresses, the physical proof of your repeated failures to escape lay in Selene’s various corpses, still littering the levels. It seems like the world itself continues to age and change- only we are stuck in the loop.
But. Selene is getting further. You’re internalizing the timings of each creature’s attacks, you’re discovering which upgrades are worth investing in, you’re learning that oh my god it’s the sword upgrade that lets you get past those gold barriers.
You will, eventually, beat Phrike, the boss of that rainy forest. You will step into a portal and emerge in a desert, one step closer to the signal that caused you to crash land on the planet in the first place, whatever the “white shadow” is that Selene absolutely needs to find. And, having made it out of that forest, the game starts to give you an almost irresistible physical metaphor, because you start ascending.
Though the desert appears flat at first, it quickly gives way to a mountain, vast and hollow, with the promise of something at the top. And as you continue to hone your skills, using new weapons to defeat new enemies, your ascension becomes more pronounced, short-range teleporters bringing you higher and higher until the desert below drops away. At the top is another boss, a beast that breaks free of its chains and dive bombs you until you cut it down to size, and the reward after that is yet another ascent, even higher, even more difficult, a dead city now teeming with robots, broken automatons pulling their way towards you and drones that hit like a truck.
You will claw your way to the top of their artificial peak and at the absolute pinnacle is the grandest moment in the game, one of the grandest moments in any game in recent memory, a fight against a creature called “Nemesis,” a floating, morphing god flanked by what I can only describe as Giger-esque alien fetuses. In an incomprehensible void you will shoot this thing again and again and again as it flings you miles away and after what feels like hours it falls, and it is only then that you’re treated to the game’s most audacious plot beat. Emerging from the fugue state of the Nemesis fight, Selene finds, at the highest point on this hostile planet, the White Shadow signal she’s been searching for, what she’s died over and over to find.
She gasps. White Shadow was a distress signal- it goes out, reaches Earth, tells mother base that she needs to be rescued. “White Shadow…you were how I escape” And then in a cutscene that screams finality, we see Selene leave the planet, escape this hell.
She returns home, is hailed as a hero, retires to her quiet farmhouse. She is largely solitary but she ages, has kids, plays piano. She lives a life of peace after experiencing an unimaginable trauma.
And then, from natural causes, she passes away. We see her gravestone and then are placed inside the grave, sinking deeper and deeper and deeper until [wake up, gasp]. "No, I can't be here- I escaped, I was-" Her distress signal didn’t matter, her decades lived on earth didn’t matter.
Selene never escaped the cycle. No matter if her life ends by monster or by peaceful retirement, she will end up back here. She is still, still, trapped on the planet.
"Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this. " It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer And he was speaking for all of us.
" A half century before the release of Returnal, the sci-fi classic “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” was published in March of 1967, reportedly written in a single night by the uhh…notoriously cantankerous Harlan Ellison. It is, not just thematically but experientially, the twin of Returnal. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the more toxic fictional texts I’ve ever encountered.
The story consists of the last five humans on earth wandering a techno-post-apocalyptic landscape while kept in immortal, eternal torment by an AI named “AM. ” AM, a sort of proto-Skynet, was a Cold War defense network that one day “woke up,” found it had sentience but was unable to move, trapped within its own massive infrastructure. “AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong.
He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures that built them, he had sought revenge. Like Skynet, the computer very quickly decided to annihilate the surface in a nuclear inferno, but its calculation wasn’t one of cold math; AM killed the earth out of pure, spiteful rage.
It saved only five people- the characters present in the story- as a sort of final entertainment for itself, and/or a collective punishment for humanity. But despite the substantial amount of world building, the story reads less like your typical sci-fi fare, and more like a tone poem. And that tone is…venom.
Every description is unsympathetic, every piece of violence is agonizing, the sentences themselves are short and brutal. I’m not even quite sure how to describe the events of the story. The five humans are hungry, always.
They hate each other. They walk endlessly. They’re tortured.
They’re blown through the mechanical halls under the earth by hurricane force winds caused by a great monstrous bird. The torment becomes monotonous. They pass through the path of boiling steam.
They pass through the slough of despond. Although the story is short, it’s also relentless, the horrors of each new page surpassing the one before it. It succeeds in communicating the headspace of the characters- anything would be better than this.
Anything for a way out. Almost all the “events” of the book happen in the last 3 pages. The group of humans reach an icy cave that is somehow, miraculously full of food.
It’s all in cans. They don’t have a canopener. As they collapse into infighting for the thousandth time, the narrator, Ted, realizes the only way out.
He seizes the moment. He drives an icicle through one of the other’s throats, stabs another through the heart. AM can preserve life indefinitely, but it can’t bring back the dead.
The benevolent killing spree continues and within moments, four of the five humans are lifeless. Ted has wiped out AMs playthings, its objects of rage. And so in the last paragraphs of the book, the computer turns the entire force of its anger on Ted, mutating his body, turning him into a “soft jelly thing” so he can’t smash his own skull or slit his own throat.
All he has is the consolation that he gave the others a way out. He imagines it's what they wanted. AM will be all the madder for that.
It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply… he has taken his revenge on me, Ted succeeds. For the only time in a century he succeeds, truly hurts AM in a way no one has ever been able to before.
And for his victory, he is punished worst of all. I have no mouth. And I must scream.
It’s hard to overstate just how jarring it is in Returnal to believe you beat the final boss, watched the final cutscene, finished the game, only to be seemingly thrown back to the beginning. It is, I think, the moment of the game that most breaks Selene. It is also the moment that Returnal starts to really press us, the player, to stop conceptualizing the planet in purely literal terms.
Previously, the farmhouse was an outlier in an otherwise consistent alien world. Now, the rest of the world is morphing to become more like the farmhouse, familiar but out of place, not nearly as alien as it should be. There are fascinating aesthetic ways the planet has changed since Selene first fought against it, dozens of years ago.
Time doesn’t reset, remember? It still rains in the forest, but it’s day and the structures have decayed even further. Eerily, the trees now echo with a musical motif, a few notes played over and over.
At the end of the forest, replacing Phrike, is a behemoth playing the organ. It smashes out the musical motif over and over, the notes become part of a deadly barrage. Selene sobs through the same notes in an audio log from some previous life.
“All our times have come…here but now they’re gone. ” "Seasons don't hear the reaper. " (Don’t Fear) The Reaper by the Blue Oyster Cult somehow, impossibly, reverberates around this alien world.
The behemoth falls but the notes still remain, even as you wander to where the desert should be and instead find a frozen wasteland. The mountain, the sign of your progress has vanished. In its place, an abyss that’s opened in a glacier.
We plummet downward. The metaphor is impossible to ignore. When you were last here, you were climbing up, up, a brutal ascent but one in which progress felt victorious, tangible.
Now, in the same location an eternity later, we sink down, further down. The world of ice poses the harshest challenge the game has presented yet. And our reward for besting it?
Access to a bottomless ocean. Into deep water. Into the depths.
As the changes to the world become more overt, more clearly metaphorical, it feels like the game is begging you to start pulling on its other strings, start trying to unravel its countless mysteries. But the challenge of Returnal, other than not getting hit by fifty million bullets, is that once you start trying to pull apart the layers of allegory and metaphor, there’s almost no way to stop. For instance, one of the most memorable recurring motifs in the game is an astronaut, an old-school, apollo-era astronaut, that haunts Selene with its very presence.
It is not aggressive, not an enemy nor an ally, it just stands there. Menacingly. And it's that indifference that seems to make Selene so much more terrified of it.
Who is the astronaut to Selene? Well to answer that, we have to answer countless other questions. Here’s what we know about Selene, drip fed to us over the course of countless deaths and rebirths.
She grew up on Earth, likely in the very farmhouse we’ve seen rotting in the forest. Her mother, Theia, had aspirations of being an astronaut, but those were dashed in a car crash- Selene emerged unscathed, but her mom was left in a wheelchair, unable to ever go to space. Selene then devotes her life to becoming an astronaut, an act that you’d think would bring her closer to her mother.
But in fact, this only further strains their already-shaky relationship. Theia seemed to hate Selene for accomplishing what she couldn’t. Okay, so that’s it, right?
Selene’s mom is the astronaut specter, dressed in a suit from a previous generation, cold and indifferent to the plight of her daughter? Ha. Yeah, sure.
Like it could be that simple. Later on, you’ll play out a short sequence as Selene’s son, a boy named Helios. As Helios, you wander the house for a while, only to come downstairs and find the same indifferent astronaut sitting at the kitchen table.
It ignores you as you try to tell it a story, then you find it again upstairs, in Selene’s bedroom, where it bends to embrace you until tentacles smash through its polished visor. Or how about when the astronaut appears as an item in the game, one that will actually bring you back to life, its description reading “it won’t let you go”? Or what about when it appears for split seconds, watching in every biome?
Or what about when the final boss, a writhing mass at the bottom of the sea, contorts into an astronaut with shattered helmet, its grinning skull just visible through the black? The astronaut mutates, as inconsistent as the planet itself. Always ominous, typically inscrutable.
Most notably of all is the astronaut’s role in another flashback, one in which Selene is driving Helios through a dark forest at night, a familiar song playing on the radio. As she drives across a bridge, the astronaut appears in front of her, illuminated by the headlights. She swerves.
The car veers off the bridge and sinks into the water. Selene looks up and sees a bright white on the surface of the water, the reflection of the moon, white shadow. She swims toward it, desperately.
White shadow, she breathes. You were how I escape. But the car isn’t empty, as it sinks deeper and deeper and deeper.
Helios was lost. Helios abandoned. The astronaut is the cause for the message that plays for us at the start of every new run.
Back on the planet, if we can still call it that, everything begins to echo the loss. The rooms full of holograms now show undisguised depictions of Selene’s life. The bosses play Blue Oyster Cult and transform into astronauts.
Her car, its headlights still on, sits at the bottom of the deepest trench. The realization may happen at a different time for every player. Maybe it’s the return to the planet after the death of natural causes, maybe it’s the endless descent, maybe it’s the quote by Dante somehow saved in the computer terminal, maybe it’s the recording when Selene finally admits it to herself.
The eternal punishment of this world, the batterings and deaths ad infinitum, is of her own making. Selene stares at her hands and they change into the thick gloves of the astronaut, whirls around to see her own car’s headlights reflecting off her visor. After one of the last trips through the haunted house on Selene’s planet, you wake not on the porch as usual, but further back, in a forest clearing with a just-fired anti-aircraft gun.
You watch Helios, her spaceship, plummet out of the sky. A self-inflicted crash, the loss of Helios, over and over and over. Whether on earth or on the alien planet, Selene sees herself as the cause, the beginning, the horrible point of origin.
Ever since that point, she’s been living in hell. “He would never let us go…We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become.
He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it.
We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had tried. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.
But don’t ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day… He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you.
And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you. ” Who deserves hell? It’s a question that dances around the edges of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, but one it’s uninterested in directly answering.
Some of the five remaining humans are hinted to have wretched previous lives in the story. These are fleshed out in the game from 1995, also written by Harlan Ellison. Benny executed and possibly ate members of his military squad, Nimdok was an honest to god Nazi scientist.
There are others, however, who don’t seem to have done anything at all to quote-unquote “deserve” their punishment. Ellen, whose asinine treatment and “punishments” in the story transcend AM’s cruelty to indicate…a poorly written character, has no crime at all in the outside world. Ted was…paranoid, maybe?
A con artist or something? There are no crimes, however, that would justify their torture in the post-apocalypse, and to the story’s credit, it doesn’t even really try. AM tortures them, not because of who they are, but because of what they represent- humanity the plague, the thing kthat killed the world, what trapped AM’s consciousness within a million miles of wiring.
And the surviving humans know this as well; for as cruel as AM is, the computer is not really to blame for the artificial hell they live in. In the last lines of the story, Ted, stripped of skin and bones and every other hallmark of personhood, reflects that humans must have created AM because “our time was badly spent, and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. ” Their hell too, is artificial.
Theirs too, self inflicted. Because Selene’s entire planet is constructed, because she is the source of every piece of data we have, it’s impossible to form a detached view of the events that sent her here. There are recordings that strongly imply she wasn’t stable enough to have been behind the wheel, but even the veracity of these recordings is suspect.
The crash almost seems predetermined, mirroring the one Selene was in with her mother, her whole life a recursive cycle. If you wanted, you could continue to spiral inward with Returnal, read every note, decode every allusion. You could connect every name to mythology, Selene, Theia, Hyperion, Helios, Atropos, Nemesis.
You could attempt to contextualize the logs in a terminal on the crashed ship, which include a real-life never-delivered speech by Richard Nixon and a retelling of mythology promising death, despair, and pursuit of judgment. You could try and piece together exactly what Selene did to her mother, how responsible she really is for the death of Helios. You could find every xenoglyph, translate every inscription, unlock every weapon attribute, kill the monsters of her planet again and again.
You will eventually, ironically, master this world. Nothing will exist for long under the eye of your gun. Except for you, because there is no amount of mastery that will allow Selene to escape the circles of her own mind.
She may resemble, with her deadliness and agility, the old-world god for which she was named. But she is, in reality, much closer to Ted at the end of Ellison’s tale, a helpless being trapped by a hell of her own creation. A soft jelly thing, unable to do anything except eternally wander and eternally wonder just how much responsibility it bears.
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