Returnal: In the time warp against the alien brood - preview

Housemarque - this name has stood for above-average arcade food for the past 10 or 15 years. It doesn't matter whether it's the two really great top-down shooters Dead Nation and Alienation, the voxel spectacle Resogun, the proper Matterfall or of course the wonderful Super Stardust series: The Finns have delivered a good to very good indie game in the past after the other. But as the developers themselves wrote in a blog post some time ago, all of these games also have a problem: They don't bring any money.

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1 And every day the Alien 2 greets wildfire 3 Alternative question Boldly headed "Arcade is dead", CEO Ilari Kuittinen explained that Housemarque's games - using the example of the 2017 Nex Machina - would be overwhelmed with good ratings, but would hardly be commercially viable. Therefore, one now switch to triple A productions and multiplayer titles.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. The result of the latter project is the currently paused Stormdivers. More interesting, however, is Returnal, the Helsinki's most ambitious project to date, for which the number of employees has now grown from around 20 to 80. But what is it all about?

And the alien greets you every day

A mushroom, please: During the game, Selene should also be haunted by visions of horror. We do not know whether this overgrown skeleton is one of them. Source: Sony / Housemarque To put it roughly, Returnal is a third-person shooter with rogue-like and horror elements. We slip into the role of the astronaut Selene, who makes an emergency landing on a strange, hostile alien planet called Atropos. As if that wasn't bad enough, the good girl is also caught in a time loop - Star Trek sends its regards. So while Selene explores the extraterrestrial world and proves herself against the local flora and fauna, with every fatal failure she is catapulted back to the seconds before her crash.

This is where the aforementioned rogue-like elements come into play. Naturally, with such an involuntary leap in time, there is hardly any time to check in large amounts of luggage. Ergo (almost) everything is lost that you picked up on your previous visit. An exception to this is the mysterious alien artifact Cthonos, which not only records your progress on your excursions, but also equips you with a random item for each pass.

Wildfire

Antropos is not too much friendly place but invites to explore. These seem to be the remains of an ancient civilization. Source: Sony / Housemarque Otherwise, as is typical for the genre, you collect everything on your journey with every "run". The most important thing: the weapons, of course. A distinction is made here between the technology that Selene already had on board her ship, and technology that she finds or tinkers together on Atropos. It is still a little unclear whether we are allowed to choose one of the standard weapons at the beginning or if we are drawn by lot, but in any case: Selene can only carry one weapon with her at a time. However, this can be adapted with countless upgrades and also has a randomly assigned second fire mode. Then your shotgun shoots explosive projectiles or leaves behind puddles of acid, distributes electric shocks or spawns nasty tentacles. There should be a total of ten basic weapons, more than 90 weapon upgrades (in three stages each) and ten fire modes - so the selection is quite decent. In addition, there are other items of equipment, including offensive items such as smart bombs, defensive "consumables" that you consume while using, or artifacts that give Selene new skills.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external ones Contents of [PLATFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. There is also another item category called parasites, which offer you not only strong advantages but also disadvantages - for example, a parasite increases your health generation, but enemies leave behind puddles of acid. In addition, you can accumulate other negative effects during your alien exploration, for example if you open chests full of traps.

Alternative question

During the fights themselves, Housemarque can then not know his arcade origin deny more. Although the previous gameplay material looks extremely chic, and the third-person perspective is also absolutely atypical for the Finns, some movements reveal the rather arcade basis. So Selene doesn't necessarily move realistically, which is underlined again by the short dash option. And with the opponents, we sometimes felt reminded of the Bullet Hell antics of earlier Housemarque games - only that you don't avoid the umpteen balls in their geometric trajectories in the form of a pixelated spaceship, but as a character in the pursuer's view. How this can be managed in the end and whether the great ambitions of the Finnish developer are bearing fruit can only be said when Returnal will be released on April 30th instead of March 19th. We are excited.