RETURNAL

How a master of arcade-style action chiseled away the superfluous to uncover something new

By Jon Bailes

Format PS5 Developer Housemarque

Publisher SIE

Origin Finland

Release 2021

Boot up Returnal and you’re already in its loop. It may seem a minor detail that there’s not so much as a title screen before you crashland on Atropos once again and wake up as protagonist Selene, but it’s a mission statement. Expect no smooth introductions, no compromise, and, most of all, no excess. Coming from Housemarque, with its reputation for fast, clinical action games, this ultra-streamlining feels both natural and experimental. It trims the player’s experience, while also binding it to Selene’s emotional state –a narrative undertaking that represented uncharted waters for the Helsinkibased studio. Yet it navigated them by staying true to its roots. Not by adding but cutting, until everything found its place.

“Through many iterations, we tend to focus on removing any unnecessary fat and distilling the game down to its core essentials in every aspect,” says Harry Krueger, the director of Returnal (and Nex Machina before it). “It was very much about creating a pure experience and that everything would reinforce this synergy between gameplay and narrative we were aiming for.” The title screen was an inevitable casualty, “one of many decisions” made to maintain the flow of the game and the integrity of its world.

It helped that there was a clear understanding of what the project was trying to achieve from the beginning, with elements such as character control and the shuffling map quickly established. “These are things we locked down and committed to and preserved throughout the entire development,” Krueger explains. “From prototyping to final product, a lot of those things remained fairly intact.” Likewise, the character of Selene and her nightmarish time-loop predicament were decided early, which in turn set up the Roguelike aspects they wanted to pursue and the basic narrative structure. “From that perspective there was a fairly clear path for us to reinforce that every step of the way,” Krueger says.

The initial plans weren’t entirely realistic, however. “In the concepting phase, of course we dared to dream,” Krueger recalls. Some of the dreams turned out to be quite fanciful. “I don’t remember the exact number, but I think there was closer to 16 or 17 biomes that I had plotted out,” he says, “with each one having at least one boss, narrative beats and different things.” The final game, released in April, has six.