Returnal- Epic dance of death

This is not the best year for a game about being stuck in an eternal time loop, where nothing much changes but things are always extremely difficult. Many people will find it hard to find the motivation to face down a punishingly challenging game about the unreliability of memory and the elasticity of time. But, despite that, I didn’t find it hard to become totally absorbed in Returnal – it’s unforgiving, sometimes dispiriting but also intriguing, mysterious, and just glorious to play.

As Selene, a deep-space scout, we crash on a planet called Atropos, full of eerily beautiful and exceptionally hostile creatures that look like the Borg on a nature trip and sound like something out of an Alex Garland movie. Leonine creatures with fronds of glowing LED tentacles leap towards you, emitting glowing orbs of death; looming robots shoot walls of orange bullets from the sky; skinny aliens screech and lob sticky acid.

If it moves, it will try to kill you, and you’d better shoot back. Every time Selene dies – and this will be very often – she finds herself back at the crash site, in the middle of a jungle that remixes itself subtly every time, having lost every useful weapon or trinket or ability modifying parasite that she gathered on the last run.

My first afternoon with Returnal took me through that jungle, past a couple of truly terrifying boss creatures, and through a Stargate-style portal to the arid ruins of the planet’s second area, the Crimson Wastes, in one epic four-hour run. I got lucky with a weapon I found early on, a shotgun-style thing with a secondary-fire mode that sent a horizontal wall of pain towards encroaching creatures. I found plenty of green pickups to refill and expand my health bar, and a weird alien machine-thing that resurrected me, and an upgrade for my suit that let me do more damage the closer Selene got to death.

I danced through every altercation, dashing and jumping and sprinting around mesmerising patterns of plasma orbs and bullets to get up close. Movement and shooting are so fast in Returnal, so instinctive, that when things are going well you feel like the archdemon of bullet hell, surviving against the odds.

Unfortunately, my shotgun turned out to be next to useless in the desert, which was mostly populated by ominous floating cubes with tentacles. By the time I got to the next boss, I was already struggling, and I flubbed it by sprinting into a pit trying to run away from a sword-wielding faceless alien that kept materialising behind my back. After that, it took me almost two days to get any further; on every attempt I seemed plagued by bad luck or failing skill. I kept coming across malignant items that caused my suit to malfunction when I picked them up, or falling through the floor to find a super-powerful mortar-firing turtle waiting for me, or opening chests to discover aggressive flying manta rays instead of a decent weapon. It was maddening. Over and over, I was sent back to the beginning. But still I kept playing.