Returnal – Housemarque Reveals Combat Gameplay Details on New PS5 Game

Sony’s PlayStation shared some new interesting details about Returnal’s gameplay and its core features. Returnal seems to introduce some heavy action sequences, mixing third-person perspective, together with some bullet-hell elements. The last part seems to be the odd feature among the rest, as we don’t see that genre being utilized often these days. It does look good though.

https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1349340549749362689?s=20

New IP, new faces, same exciting gameplay.

The new IP follows Selene, who explores the procedurally generated environments of Atropos and its secrets. Based on the developers’ claims, we can expect a lot of exploration combined with rogue-like elements, that will make us have the “one more time” feeling we all love -or hate, that games like Binding of Isaac heavily took advantage of.

Selene will be able to find many cool weapons in the world, but she can additionally craft her own tools of death. This most likely means that we will see a good amount of varied weapons, which will be accompanied with certain skills, in the form of Weapon Traits. Combining those skills/effects with each other, as they do stack, will be the key to success in the unpleasant environment of Atropos.

Selene can hold up to one weapon at a time, which may sound odd considering the amount of the tools you will be able to find/craft, which will in result make your choice matter a lot, based on the situation’s needs. However, the devs made sure to make every weapon unique and interesting, by taking advantage of the adaptive trigger on the DualSense controller. Each weapon will have an alt-fire mode, randomly assigned to it from the diverse pool the game features, and you can change modes by simply using the different inputs of the controller, like holding half way the specified button.

An AAA rogue-like.

Following the rogue-like‘s formula, each death in the game starts the loop of being revived again, running through some different areas each time, progressing as much as possible. The more you traverse through Atropos, the more items you’ll find, including Parasites and Artifacts. Those introduce some additional effects for Selene to stack up, which won’t be always beneficial, again, depending on what you need at the time. The same goes for the equivalent of the game’s “chests”, which are called containers, and some of them can be cursed. A cursed container is always a risk to open, since they can even explode in your face, the moment you try to collect their contents.

All of the above info is barely a fraction of what we will find in the dark world of the Returnal, so we will need to wait and see what Housemarque has in store for us. For more info about the current state of the game’s core features, feel free to check here.

Returnal is set to release on March 19, exclusively on PS5.