Returnal (PS5) (April 30th)

I couldn't get passed the first boss lol.

Like you spronk , I believe they should have a hades system where if you die to get a 1% perm buff to your character's damage hit pool - sooner or later you just get an opportunity to play through it or the difficulty spikes lesson the more you die.

ShakyJake said:

Watch some videos of the boss fights. They have predictable patterns. The game really isn't that difficult. I feel the progression is pretty fair.

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Yep, I'm older and slower now, and after watching that got hit exactly once during the 1st boss.

It's actually a really well done game, had to pull of something newish these days. By new I mean Sci-Fi / Rogue / fps combo

Returnal is one of those games where you think the fights are way harder than they actually are, and once you get a win, you end up getting hit like once in the process. Then you go "THAT is what I was stuck on before?"

However, the late-game is pretty annoying. Like the 6th (last) area, but it also kinda starts in the 5th. There are some extremely nasty enemies that can just wipe you out fast, and going back to the beginning of stage 4 every time is so annoying. I've been told that the game gets easier and easier as it goes on and you accumulate more powerups, but I found that to not really be the case unless I bumrushed to the bosses and didn't stop to fight things.

Anything that restores your HP is key. Abilities that heal you as you do damage, etc, will keep you afloat for a long time if you can secure them and not die.

Yeah this was a great game and I wish it weren't so inaccessible to most people. Even something basic like a Hades-style buff the more times you fail would at least help the average person along. Most try it out and really like it, then go "I ain't got time for that" once they realize how much time/progress you lose regularly.

Also probably the single game I started/stopped more times than any other game in history. Looking back through this very thread you could probably find a bunch of times where I decided to give it another try, then tapped out for another few months. Only reason I finally went all in with it and got it beaten was because I was coming off of Elden Ring which makes you feel like you can topple any challenge.

Don't remember what my favorite weapon was, but I definitely had one.

Fun Fact: The haunting dirge that plays in Stage 4 and during the fight with Hyperion is actually a distorted version of "Don't Fear The Reaper". Mind was blown when I found this out. That whole section of the game made me really depressed and I don't know why.

Hateyou said:

I gave up on the first level. I cleared the entire thing a couple times and there are red doors I didn’t know how to open. Wasn’t into it enough to look it up.

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I bet "I gave up on the first level" represents like 30-45% of the Returnal playerbase. It's a shame that the game doesn't do a better job letting people actually get into it. I enjoyed it (on the like, 5th attempt over the years when I finally had a winning strategy) but I can't really recommend it to anyone either.

Hateyou said:

I couldn’t progress anymore so I assume the second level was behind one of them. I got stuck is all, I didn’t really care…that’s why I just stopped playing instead of trying to look it up.

If the second level wasn’t behind one of them…idk where it was, I had cleared everything else I could find.

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Gitgud Fagt!

Y'all are crazy. There was nothing excessively difficult or prohibiting in this. Especially given how pervasive the rogue-lite and Souls genre is these days. I only played it this year so maybe subsequent patches changed the fundamentals of the game over the years. Getting past the 1st boss was the first barrier and it didn't take too long. After that it isn't specifically linear since you can always skip him and move forward. Whether that is a good strat is up to you. But as ShakyJake mentions the areas after the 1st are progressively easier.

More seriously though the presentation of the story was the cool thing for me here. But I get in to all that dumb stuff like reading all the notes in Control and geeking out over figuring out what's going on. So pushing ahead to find the next recording, flashback, story element motivated me.