THE MAKING OF ... RETURNAL

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

- Jon Bailes

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.