Topic: Returnal

@Just_2_milky Control Ultimate Edition has pretty decent DualSense usage. Haptics are nice, you can feel Jesse’s feet click on the tile, etc. And the triggers feel different for each weapon.

@MatthewJP Great work on making some progress. I think you’d be sorely disappointed if you gave up on this and traded it in, I promise you it’s worth the perseverance. Also haven’t played it yet but I’m sure that Deathloop is only half the game this is.

The grapple really opens the game up as you can now grab a lot more goodies through biome 1 on the way to 2.

Forgot to say I was also the same with the haptics etc. Nothing has really come close although some games are better than others. Ghost of Tsushima is not too bad but I feel they could have done a bit more.

Somewhat surprisingly maybe, Bugsnax uses the controller features quite well

@MatthewJP Hang in there. It’s a great game. I am by no means a skilled gamer, but I enjoyed the ride thoroughly. I averaged a little over 1 death per hour. I forget my exact stats but the game took me around 70-80 hours to complete all 3 acts and I think I had in the neighborhood of 80-90 deaths. Biome 3 is actually the hardest I think, at least on the first run exposure to it. Going back to it after doing some of the late game stuff it did feel much more manageable, but it is a really tough one to clear. I don’t want to sound discouraging, but just being realistic.

The good news is Biome 4 was pretty easy I thought and was one of my favorite in the way it unfolds.

You might have figured it out by now, but the grapple is not only a useful tool to get to previously unreachable areas, but it is also a good tool to use defensively. I never got really proficient at it until late game, but shooting across a room via a grapple point is a wonderful way to avoid taking damage from enemies. Especially some of the larger brute enemies, or if you get swarmed by several enemies at a time. You’re basically invulnerable to most attacks while you grapple.

These are stunning...

Booted up Returnal this afternoon to explore Abyssal Scar a few times — I'm now just one cipher away from the platinum. Each time I go back to this game, I remember why I like it so much. So fun to play.

So close! Good luck finding it.

@Quintumply You can do it! Best of luck to your last few runs hunting!

Question about the survey (I'm still far from finishing the game but trying to clear overgrown ruins fully). The xenoglyph ciphers and scout logs I'm missing - are they there in every run and I'm just missing them, or are they randomly generated and may not be present in every run?

@MatthewJP They're always in the same rooms but the rooms might not be there.

@MatthewJP yes, if there’s is a room that comes with a cipher, then that cipher comes with the room every time. It’s the room that is randomly generated.

@Quintumply I check out the Housemarque discord server every now and then and it's amazing how many requests there are for DLC. There's a lot of people like us that love the gameplay and just want a bit more. There's been a few videos out lately about the tech behind the game so it did make me wonder if that was leading up to something.

Good luck finding that last cipher!

@render Historically, Housemarque has always been pretty active with post-launch content for its games. Then again, Returnal is a bigger game than the studio's made before, so it's not quite the same situation. I'm hopeful for some DLC as well, though — I've said it before, but there's so much potential to expand the game.

Finally got the plat! I’m double posting but I’m allowed because I got the plat (and I work here mwahaha). Still my favourite game of this year, I think. At this point I don’t think anything else will take that spot.

@Quintumply Awesome, congrats!

And ... same here, I think.

@Quintumply Nice one! I agree, I don’t think anything will pass this year will Returnal in terms of gameplay & haptics/triggers.

@Quintumply Woohhoooo well done!! It's a great one to bag. Totally agreed as well, best game of the year by a long stretch.

Hello everyone:)

Played the game yesterday for the first time and i really enjoyed it for a while. Then i got frustrated because i died around 7-8 times at around 50 percent of the first biome. The game throwed me some fungal green monsters and some huge leaping monsters at the same time and that was the end for me. I felt I am not good enough for this game. I mean a love hard games played all the souls games and Sekiro and Nioh several times but this one is something different. I don't feel i'm getting better. I really want to go back to play it but i'm afraid I'm just going to die again at the same place after played an hour or two. And this is just the first biome, no bosses nothing just single enemies... I don't feel i made any progression so far. Should i go back or should i just give it up? I hate to give up things that early but this one...i don't know... How was your first hours in the game?

@Tatarimokke The early game is tough! You have a pretty limited range of weapons and they're pretty low level so don't have much extra punch.

It's worth trying out as many of the guns as possible though as any progress towards unlocking new alt-fire methods, traits etc carries over between runs and sometimes all it takes is picking up a weapon with a combo of traits you like to make the difference between a successful run and a failed one.

I really recommend using melee a lot in the early biome too. It can one hit kill a lot of smaller enemies and can be really useful to stagger big ones or to take a good chunk of health of them once staggered.

Everyone has a biome or two that they struggle with and it's certainly most frustrating when it's the first one. There are people on here who will have died waaaaay more times than you in biome 1 though and they finished the game.

Good luck!