Returnal Review

Housemarque spent fifteen years perfecting arcade shooters and then spent all of that credit on a third-person roguelike where every projectile pattern reads as clearly at ninety frames as it did in a twin-stick game. That legibility is the whole trick: the screen is saturated with orange orbs and purple lattices, and you can still parse it, because contrast and telegraphing were budgeted first. The alt-fire cooldown and the adrenaline stacks push you toward aggression, and the risk economy of parasites and malignant items makes every pickup a real decision.

Selene's story is told through audio logs, a recurring suburban house rendered in first person, and an ending that refuses to resolve cleanly, which is braver than the genre usually allows. The absence of mid-run saves at launch was a genuine design failure for a sixty-minute cycle, later patched. Haptics on the DualSense are used here better than anywhere since. Sharp, hostile and unusually literate.