Returnal™

I'll be straight with you: I came into Returnal skeptical. Bullet hell plus roguelike plus third-person shooter sounded like a committee designed it to make me feel bad at games. A few hours in, I stopped caring about feeling bad, because the moment-to-moment combat is some of the most electrically alive gunplay I've touched on PC. Selene moves with a snap and precision that makes dodging dense waves of neon energy projectiles feel like a rhythm game you're somehow winning, right up until you aren't. The core loop works like this: every run through planet Atropos is procedurally generated, which means the weapons and upgrades you find change each cycle. Stick with one weapon long enough and you build proficiency that unlocks passive perks, so there's genuine incentive to commit to a playstyle rather than just grab whatever drops. The alien creatures fling multicolored energy beams that fill the screen in patterns that are deadly and genuinely beautiful at the same time. Boss rooms are brutal checkpoints that will send you back to square one, but the game never feels cheap once you know what you're doing. There's no difficulty slider, so newcomers should be warned: Returnal does not negotiate. It expects you to learn, die, learn more, and come back meaner. The PC port, handled by Climax Studios, lands in solid shape. Performance on mid-range hardware is reasonable, with 60fps achievable on high settings without a flagship GPU. One hard recommendation from me: play it with a DualSense if you can. The adaptive trigger feedback and the controller speaker audio carry a layer of atmosphere that keyboard and mouse, while functional, simply don't replicate. It's one of the rare cases where the input device changes how the game actually feels. Now, the co-op situation, because this is where you need to manage expectations hard. Online co-op is included and it's genuinely fun when it works. A second player joins via the Chronosis device found in each biome, you both fight through the alien labyrinth together, and a revive mechanic softens the brutality a little. The catch is that the Chronosis device locks after one use per cycle, so if your session ends mid-run, you cannot re-invite your friend until you die and restart. The Tower of Sisyphus mode and the story house sequences are also unavailable in co-op. If you were picturing a full campaign playthrough side-by-side, this is not that. Think of it more as drop-in support runs. The progression is tied to the host, and clients keep logs, xenoglyphs, and Scout Rank progress, which is a fair trade for what is ultimately a helping mechanic bolted onto a fundamentally solo experience. For the solo crowd, Returnal on PC is a serious argument for the genre. The story is cryptic and atmospheric, delivered through environmental storytelling and audio logs rather than cutscenes, which means you can play twenty hours and still be piecing together what is actually happening to Selene. Some players love that; others will bounce off it. There are also occasional technical hiccups, including some reported black screen issues on startup that a restart clears, so it's not a flawless port. But at an 81% positive rating across over ten thousand Steam reviews, the community verdict is clear enough: the rough edges don't sink the experience.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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