Returnal, Difficulty & The Limits Of The Roguelite

not only do i love hard games i find it impossible to enjoy easy games assassin's creed is basically unplayable now because it's pointlessly easy destiny 2 instantly loses me when there's no new content because the vast majority of the game is just too easy on top of that i'm a long time fan of house mark games i came across their games years ago when my binding of isaac obsessions sent me chasing every twin stick shooter out there housemark was one of the very best twin stick shooter developers their games were small tight focused arcade style top down shooters with flashy graphics and intense combat they might have been the best bullet hell developer in the world i say all this right at the start because i should love returnal completely i think i might actually be the target audience for this game and yet as much as i love the combat i don't think i've recently played a game that annoys me as much as this one did and that annoyance is precisely because i should love this game but i don't totally love this game i'm not even convinced i like this game half the time the ps5 got its first big exclusive release since demon's souls and it didn't come from santa monica or gorilla or naughty dog instead it came from a small little indie studio in scandinavia the game costs 70 dollars and i think it's very likely that price tag came to affect the actual design because while eternal has some of the very best movement the flashiest graphics the snazziest haptics and the toughest combat it also has layers of [ __ ] smeared across the design to seem to exist only to make sure you need 30 hours to beat five levels before getting your money's worth let's talk about all the big things that work really well in return and all the little things that work terribly after the logo it starts so well i was texting with my friend larry as i began playing this game and for the first few hours i was beyond impressed movement and return is about as good as any action game you will play you're quick your jumps are responsive enough to manage tricky platforming and the game is reasonable about fall damage most importantly you've got a dash with generous iframes this is the basic stuff that any action game needs to get perfect if it wants to be great and return all gets every one of them exactly right it feels great to move around a game's difficulty can only be in relation to the tools it gives the player do maternal is the most perfectly difficult game ever and that's because you have all the needed tools to handle any encounter now no game is actually always your fault when you fail that's a good myth unless you count oh damn i ran left into this room not realizing that would end up with me on the side of the room where a baron of hell spawns but great games like eternal neo and souls keep the percentage of deaths that are your fault very very high then a game like ac valhalla can't even try to make the game hard because you simply don't have the tools available to make challenging fun movement and animations are sluggish and weightless and the dodge is more concerned with looking realistic than with being a fun combat tool in a video game quick rolling and armor isn't realistic but it sure is a fun game mechanic if dark souls 3 had the same dodge as valhalla the whole game has to change because you no longer have the tools to make difficulty fun because house mark is a twin stick shooter dev they're quite good at realizing it's better that a mechanic feels good than looks realistic when it comes to weapons return all gets the big things right too they're interesting looking they sound great they're balanced well for the enemies that the game has i mean kinda we'll get to that in the section about the [ __ ] the game fails at but the big things are all really well done for instance housemark has always excelled at art design even their small little indie twin stick shooters were great looking games but return all takes things to a new level it wouldn't be crazy to call return on the very best looking games ever made everything about the visual presentation on offer is top shelf with the benefit of having an almost blood-borne like knack for making the entire package perfectly reinforce the story of the game the visuals keep you interested but also offer tantalizing clues about what's actually going on each new level is distinct and interesting and even when the game starts reusing assets halfway through they're presented in a way that feels totally fresh the lighting is phenomenal to look at though it ends up presenting some annoying gameplay issues and particle effects might be the finest i've ever seen in a game and the levels have an intense amount of interactivity that is just awesome breaking statues or sheets of ice sees the geometry crumble into like convincing pieces i'm embarrassed to admit that i played the game for like 20 hours and my son played for about 10 minutes and realized that these laser spotlight guys you can shoot them in their eyes close that's awesome in fact everything from the gameplay to the lighting to the particle effects and even the way the story is presented feel strongly influenced by remini's excellent 2019 title control it's that kind of visual package though the core gameplay in return is better than control that's without a doubt returner's basic combat system is spectacular all the issues that piss me off with the game have nothing to do with how the actual moment-to-moment combat flows but are rather tied to balance length and the limits of the roguelite genre returnal is an extremely challenging game just mechanically if you turned enemy damage down 25 percent return would still be one of the most challenging games around because it relies on both extreme twitch skill and extreme pattern recognition the game is very souls-like and that the entire system relies on knowing when to balance offense and defense the vast majority of enemies only have a few attacks that are well telegraphed but those attacks severely punish spamming of any kind you can't dodge spam attacks come out so often and are so long lasting the player has to be judicious about how they move and which enemies are prioritized in many games a player is pushed to take out dangerous enemies first and leave the fodder for last that's how something like eternal handles most arenas in fact eternal just continually spawns adds until the dangerous enemies are eliminated fraternal makes a player spasmodically run around the arena killing the small enemies while avoiding the dangerous ones because the small enemies are in the habit of flooding the arena with overlapping long-lasting attacks in fact if there's one problem with the basic core combat here is that a few of the super powerful enemies have like undodgeable almost instantly firing off melee lunge attacks these are incredibly [ __ ] frustrating in a game that's this precise and all of them should have had better tells but for the most part 99 percent of everything in the game feels great when maternal is firing at all cylinders it plays very much like any other bullet hell game you need to be in an almost trance-like state or else you'll [ __ ] it up and return all only lets you [ __ ] up two or three times before you're dead most of the time i'm actually in combat in return i find it to be one of the best games i've ever played even after it kept pissing me off i kept playing because it feels that good unfortunately there are several things that take what should be an almost perfect action game and make it pointlessly frustrating to the point that several times i decided it was not worth continuing i did eventually beat the game because near the end progression suddenly speeds up but return spends dozens of hours punishing the player for both small mistakes and even worse with brute force rng the player has no control over it's long it's really long spelunky is one of the hardest games ever made it is ridiculously brutal and unforgiving binding of isaac is far harder than most people recall and dead cells in hades are highly challenging games that slowly become easier as the player unlocks better items and permanent upgrades the entire roguelite genre is based upon this formula the games require both mastery of the mechanics levels and enemies but also slowly make the game easier as you unlock things all these games also rely massively on rng to decide how the run will go you can beat isaac without picking up an item or without getting hit it is insanely difficult but it can be done however within the first 10 or 15 hours you will also end up lucking into a brimstone bended spoon tammy head run or a guppy transformation that will let you blast through the game that's one of the core things that keeps you playing in isaac or dead cells beating the game once isn't the goal the player needs to beat the game over and over to really finish it and most of these games allow the player to feel totally overpowered every 5 or 10 runs dying on the third level of isaac stings a hell of a lot less when you're coming off a run where you entered each room and blew everything up instantly by pressing a button there's one other thing that all the best roguelite games have in common how long a full run ends up taking a successful run of nuclear throne gungeon isaac or spelunky can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much you explore i'm the kind of guy who enters every single room in a level so my runs are usually on the long side but it's insanely rare for a roguelite run to take more than an hour this is an incredibly important design choice dying in the middle of a good but not great run sucks but it's balanced by the fact that you only invested 35 minutes returnal is pretty much a by-the-books roguelite aside from two big differences first there are no overpowered runs in return in fact the very first one i had was the last run i ever did when i beat the game for a second time eternal doesn't have a guppy transformation there is no brimstone tammy's head it just doesn't happen and two a successful run of eternal does not take 40 minutes it can take two and a half hours sometimes three hours i'm pretty sure i've had runs that took three hours dying in hell and isaac after like 35 minutes is frustrating dying to a boss in return after two hours is horrendous it is almost game breakingly [ __ ] returnal does have the normal get more powerful over time by unlocking stuff loop but it is insanely slow you find new weapons like once every four or five hours and you find new weapon effects but you need to power those weapon effects up they're not instantly unlocked now you do have some control over the length after defeating a boss you can hypothetically skip levels to get back to where you were hypothetically but in reality you simply cannot i spent maybe five hours skipping directly to the next level after i beat the first boss because that's what the game seemed to imply i needed to do and repeatedly i failed before realizing that actually you cannot do that and live enemies do so much damage that fully leveling up your health is mandatory and that means carefully clearing each level in its entirety to find and buy every single upgrade possible more than that if you fail to level up your weapon proficiency you will simply arrive at a point where you cannot out dps the enemies while the enemy design of eternal is very smart and makes for extremely satisfying combat it also creates a system where if you're unable to quickly kill enemies you will simply be overwhelmed i'd say like 90 of my deaths were caused by falling and by not being able to kill enemies fast enough to handle an encounter now again return feels amazing to play and the combat can be masterful but it also asks a ton of the player there's a gears of war active reload system that feels like an almost completely pointless extra layer of difficulty layered on top of rng layered on top of a base game that's already by its very nature an insanely demanding game this is made even worse by the fact that rng controls the enemy encounters the following clip is the very first enemy encounter ever run with the starting pistol this isn't at all uncommon runs will end because you simply do not have the tools to deal with a room period but even though it becomes quickly obvious that you need to clear the entire level in order to progress the game raterno still has a bunch of design decisions that make this as annoying as possible bosses do not drop health when defeated and almost always drop one useless item i assume this is to make you realize you only need to fight each boss once but it also means that fighting the boss again is totally pointless and it means that the first time through when you finally beat the level and taking down the boss you get jack [ __ ] for doing it this is like the polar opposite of what most roguelike games do where the boss drops the best items the bosses in this game have the whole dark souls 2 thing going on where they are way way easier than the levels but the bosses themselves are just amazing they mix music atmosphere and particle effects to be the most memorable things in the game it took four tries to beat the first boss but then i beat every other boss on the first or second try and the one time it took me two tries because i didn't understand what to do in the third phase of this boss these bosses are challenging but they can be learned and it seems a shame to skip them every time especially because you're going through the whole damn level anyway but if you're only going to get one garbage item and no health why would you even bother what a strange and ultimately kind of dumb decision on the design lastly another convention of the roguelite genre is the cursed item almost every roguelite game features items that require trade-offs in dead cells there were those cursed chests that you could open for better loot but then make you kill 10 enemies without being hit to end the curse this system has a fun wrinkle to the genre and adds a pleasant risk reward decision for the players to make but return old takes this way too far almost all of the powerful parasites have extreme negative effects some are so ridiculous i doubt any person ever will even take them once they were the ones that make it impossible to use healing items why would any person ever take that there are other ways to heal but they're all based on luck and rng i doubt it's even possible to beat the game using that item there's another debuff that crops up on [ __ ] all the time that increases your dodge cooldown to like 5 seconds this item literally makes the game impossible there are multiple enemies that send attack patterns that require frequent dodging there are groups of mobs with overlapping attacks the second half of the game has rooms with multiple of these guys with their attacks overlapping even opening chests or picking up healing items can curse you and the debuff is random with the way to clear the curse also random it might be something easy like kill 10 enemies or it could require collecting 250 gold which is what you get from my 8 combat arenas or it could be kill enemies simultaneously four times which is often basically impossible it can only be done with like two weapons and it's insanely rare to be able to melee two enemies at the same time i twice got the dodge debuff attached to the kill enemies at once thing these are both automatic run enders by the end of the game you will unlock a rare consumable that clears debuffs but it's one of the most rare consumables to find and in the final level almost every single item is cursed every single one and worst of all an enemy appears who literally curses you with his attacks i managed to beat the final boss on my second time through the level mainly because i got lucky the curses the enemy put on me were mild ones that don't matter as opposed to the first time when he hit me with the take damage when picking up items and take damage when reloading your weapon debuff returnal is already insanely reliant on rng because dps is king in this game if you can't do enough damage to enemies fast enough you lose period and the damage you do is reliant on finding the right gun at the right level with the right stats with the right perks and those also being at the right level adding even more extremely aggravating and harsh rng on top of that makes the game needlessly punishing when you add that rng on top of the extreme length of runs it is a recipe for screaming i haven't had a game make me actually yell in several years i have made a concerted effort to keep my voice low when games pissed me off over the last 4-5 years i [ __ ] and moan about games all the time but i do it quietly these days returnal broke that streak many times it broke it dying to [ __ ] and wasting 40 minutes sucks dying to [ __ ] and wasting two and a half hours is unforgivable and to top this section off this extremely hard game with runs that rely on rng to a massive degree and with runs that can take up to three freaking hours has a few other wrinkles that take it from amazing to maybe you should wait to buy this territory return is a buggy [ __ ] mess the game outright crashed on me four times including once at the very end of the final level and on that run it was the one run i'd ever had that was overpowered i had several runs where doors stopped opening which is effectively a crash i finally beat the final boss after an arena i was sure had crashed the game usually when the game would crash it would go like my tv speakers were blowing out then the game would crash on the final level that happened again but instead of crashing the game the audio just stopped working so i finished the level and had the final epic boss fight like this then i watch the pre-credits cut scene like this epic bro now all games have crashes i've had isaac crash many times when isaac released that was a big problem because there was no saving but edmund listened to the players and admitted he was wrong and added automatic saving every time you enter a room so if the doorbell rings or you're just tired or you get called in to work at 11 pm you can stop playing and come back to where you were or to be honest you can just turn it off because hell you've only been playing 30 minutes anyway obviously returnal one of the hardest games of the last 10 years that has an issue with crashing requires extreme rng luck and takes up to three hours to complete a run has a save feature i mean obviously you wouldn't make a game that can have a crash wipe out hours of your players time right yeah no there is no save feature i can't even understand the thinking here and anyone who defends that is [ __ ] wrong flat out wrong they don't have a different opinion they are wrong having a crash wipe out two hours of my time is totally freaking unacceptable outrageous actually i'm not even going to spend time explaining why letting a crash wipe out hours of my time is unacceptable that is [ __ ] self-evident man story no spoilers so i'm not going to get into the specifics of the story so i don't spoil anything for you let's say that returnal like most roguelite games uses the genre as a story component celine keeps dying and being reborn on an alien planet and the game revolves around figuring out what's going on i quickly basically figured out what was going on because it's rather obvious though i didn't figure out fully exactly why it was going on well after completing the game twice to get the full ending i still don't understand because they decided to make it open to interpretation i think this is annoying [ __ ] i found the story components of eternal to be pretty [ __ ] masterful it's doled out way too [ __ ] slowly and it kind of screws up a story's pacing to only get new information every four hours but everything about the story from the environmental storytelling to the first person interactive stuff to the cut scenes and dialogue is fantastic it's so fantastic that i expected them to really deliver a satisfying ending instead they decided they couldn't be [ __ ] bothered to actually explain what happened close your ears people because we're gonna do like 20 seconds of spoilers skip here to not hear it three two one here we go okay so very early on i decided that the entire game is actually in celine's mind it's pretty obvious that she's not actually on the planet you find a note rejecting her application to join a space mission and near the end you hear celine's end of a phone call that is obviously with a surgeon i ended up coming to the conclusion that celine had some kind of treatment at first i thought this was some kind of electro shock or other future treatment for mental illness the final cut scene implies the game is a form of psychosis related to her guilt at failing to save her daughter's life in a car accident celine drove her car off a bridge into a river killing her daughter this is pretty powerful actually as you realize the significance of the final level being a dive deeper and deeper into a watery abyss so everything is right there for a powerful ending but unfortunately house mark decided to keep things oblique and metaphorical you can't be certain exactly what happens you can't be certain what's the significance of the astronaut you can't be certain who celine was where she is and why she's hallucinating the events of the game and that is annoying the ambiguity that pervades the entire game is great exactly perfect aside from the needless difficulty making the game take twice as long as it should have but it's great however an ending need to provide answers the sopranos was panned by some for an ending i found to be perfect because it left things unexplained but that was the point of that ending tony soprano will keep going anyone in that diner could be a cop could be an assassin could be a gas station attendant his life will keep going until he's arrested or killed and he'll spend that life not knowing what comes next for him or whether his family is safe that's the point that's good ambiguity it expands the story outward without artificially bringing it to a close but returnal is bad ambiguity because it's literally impossible to know the basic core aspects of the story who is selene what was her job who was the astronaut why is she hallucinating where is she at this moment these are fundamental aspects that need to be addressed to call a story complete it is a [ __ ] cop-out to not fundamentally address those things a way to end the story without having to worry about details or plot holes or contradictions instead of doing the hard work of wrapping it up in a consistent believable satisfying ending instead it throws the whole pile into the player's lap and says [ __ ] you figure it out whatever you think could be right man that's the whole fun no no it's bad storytelling and a failure it's also arrogant it takes what was building to be a great story and retroactively makes it a kinda pile of [ __ ] wrapping up okay returnto has some of the sweetest [ __ ] third-person combat mechanics i have ever played there are times where it feels like it might be one of the very best third-person shooters ever it's world levels enemies bosses and storytelling other than the non-ending are all top-notch [ __ ] so much so that i find myself wondering why is this game a roguelite at all there's a reason roguelites are generally short on story because it's very frustrating to have to fight your way to a cut scene the games where it works like hades manage to have a very simple story and to dole out that story much more frequently every time you die in hades there's someone to talk to a joke to hear something to learn about a character but return gives you a tiny crumb of story every four hours at best to get another piece of story you have to at least make it to a boss it is extremely frustrating to want to learn about a story only to die two hours in a few minutes shy of getting to your goal when you add that tension to the fact that so many of fraternal's deaths boil down to straight up luck it is a recipe for extreme frustration return could work as a roguelite with some tweaks malignancy and malfunctions need to be tuned way the [ __ ] down they should be less punishing and the chances should be greatly reduced taking on a run-ending malfunction opening a chest only to find a shitty pistol that's worse than what you're holding is garbage having all the healing items in the final level be a coin flip where it's heads you get healed tails you take [ __ ] damage is pointless [ __ ] that does zero to make the game more fun more interesting more enjoyable it just makes it shittier having a massive sponge enemy surrounded by exploding enemies who give you devastating random debuffs if he hits you is straight putrid [ __ ] all of that [ __ ] should be massively tuned down the speed at which you start getting better weapons should be increased items could be more powerful the game could instead of making a painfully slow grind to beat each level take a page from isaac and let the player become overpowered occasionally to keep them going and because it's too late to address the issue of three hour runs the game straight up needs a save system period and the discussion there is no argument on the other side that makes a lick of sense but that's a lot of changes which begs the question did this game really need to be a roguelite wouldn't have worked just as well in fact better if it had just been a level based shooter you could even keep the format you could need to beat each level a few times as you slowly upgraded your power until she manages to figure out the path forward you could keep it just as hard but sand out the fury by not totally wasting hours of the player's time every time they die i find myself suspecting that the extreme rng based difficulty on offer here isn't as much a design decision as a financial decision returno is a game by a tiny studio known for arcade games that's being sold as a blockbuster first party sony exclusive and it delivers in its high quality visuals and tight gameplay but sony has decided it's so [ __ ] awesome that its games need to be 70 dollars and you can't sell a 12 hour action shooter for 70 bucks so the game needed to be 30 to 40 hours which means progression needed to be slowed to a crawl and rng needed to kill people dozens of times to make certain that they didn't skill their way to the end by the eight hour mark the game just systematically prevents you from doing that you can learn everything know everything make your dodges and simply be unable to take down a room of enemies because you straight up cannot kill them before they kill you when that happens it doesn't feel like you died it feels like the devs killed you and that feels like [ __ ] it feels [ __ ] infuriating at least for me and when i realized that the devs were killing me because they think i need to get my seventy dollars worth i get even more annoyed i hope return all sells well enough that housemark becomes a full aaa studio because they are clearly capable of making one of the very best action games in the world but if they're gonna do that they need to fully ditch the arcade game [ __ ] because these two genres don't fit together don't kill me because i'm not allowed to beat the game yet and maybe if you're gonna do a good story don't tie it to a roguelite unlock system oh and next time end your [ __ ] story don't leave it up to me to make up my mind i'm not the writer you do that i have a job i can't even score this game dude it's a 10 pretty [ __ ] often like very often it is really great but it's also a negative 50 pretty often and it's 70 bucks but hey at least you'll be playing for 30 hours right that's the most important thing you got your money's worth all right thanks for coming i'll see you next time i'll probably do resident evil village which is actually very good surprisingly good all right bye [Music] you

Channel: Pliny The Welder

Views: 11,143

Keywords: Returnal Is Too Hard, Returnal Is Frustrating, Returnal save, Returnal no saves, Returnal crash, Returnal crashes, Returnal progression, Returnal weapon proficiency, Returnal difficulty, Returnal bosses, Returnal too hard, Returnal too difficult, Returnal too long, Returnal story explained

Id: ZsIKYazB2gk

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021