I would too, I kinda didn’t finish the game, so I can’t answer any of those questions except that last one and I’m holding onto that for blackmail purposes.
ZERO PUNCTUATION BROKEN AGE SIMULATOR
What is the mystery behind the alien signal? How many times has Selene gone through the cycle? Why does her house keep appearing on the alien planet and making her play a Bloober Team first person walking simulator for five minutes? Is it real? Is any of this real? Are we even Selene anymore? Who did that eggy fart? Wouldn’t you like to know. Returnage very much frontloads its explorey platformy third person shooting gameplay but brings across enough intrigue with its isolated plot elements to keep me wanting to push forward. Also, she keeps finding corpses of other versions of herself and audio logs from a possible future self who sounds like she’s gone two imposing erect penises short of an H.R. In this case, our protagonist Selene crash lands on a monster planet covered in mysterious alien ruins and, well, and monsters obviously, and soon finds that every time she gets killed she wakes up back at her ship with a starting gun and all her bits reestablished. Like when you sneak psilocybin into someone’s breakfast cereal and then watch them go out to collect the mail.
The kind of thing where it takes a single alien concept that turns everything on its head and see what happens to an ordinary person having to deal with it.
ZERO PUNCTUATION BROKEN AGE MOVIE
Leaving aside the slightly awful name that reads more like the kind of made-up word that would follow a game’s main title and a dry heave, Returnal is a nice chunk of good old hard sci fi that plays like a Roguelite version of Metroid Prime by way of the movie Prometheus, and I for one am always in the mood for a good hard sci fi-ing. The brainstorming meeting that thought that one up must have gotten through enough donuts to conceal the entire contents of your mum’s bedside cabinet. Only this is a roguelite with triple-A graphics and financial backing, and as tends to be the case when triple-A gets its cakey fingers into something that indie and retro circles have been playing with since Peter Molyneux still had all his own hair, they’re acting like they fucking invented the concept, why else would they name the game after it. Returnal is, in the simplest possible terms, a roguelite, a game with procedurally generated maps that you have to start from scratch every time you die. Perhaps there lies a universal truth in the premise of this week’s subject, Returnal, in which the protagonist is trapped in an existentially horrifying cycle of death and resurrection in pursuit of an answer to the overhanging question: is it worth buying a fucking PS5 yet? And the related question, is it finally time to have an interaction with an eBay scalper that doesn’t end with you picking bits of broken teeth out of the treads of your shoes? Well let’s not go nuts. Cycles of eating creme eggs and shitting them out to make room for more creme eggs. When you think about it, aren’t we all trapped in cycles of one kind or another? Cycles of work and sleep, hopefully not at the same time. We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Returnal.
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