During the presentation of Future of Gaming, held on Friday night, Sony presented not only big-budget, but also smaller-scale exclusives. Among them Returnal is a roguelike shooter from the Finnish studio Housemarque, which developed Resogun, Dead Nation and .
In Returnal, players take on the role of a female astronaut whose ship crashed on a dangerous exotic planet. Soon the heroine realizes that she is stuck in a time loop. After each death, she relives the attack on the aircraft, the crash and battles with the local fauna. The more time she spends on the planet, the more her mind suffers, but she has no choice.
“This world becomes a part of me. Penetrates my mind. Into my memories. The longer I stay here, the more I feel like I'm losing my mind. But I can't afford to lose hope. All I can do is continue to fight and look for answers. My only hope is to break the cycle before it breaks me.”
Returnal combines planet exploration with monster shooting from a third-person perspective. The trailer mainly showed action sequences. Whenever a player dies, the area is rebuilt using procedural generation algorithms. Users will be able to switch between shooting modes using just one trigger. Roguelike takes advantage of the PlayStation 5's sound system to create a "living alien world." In addition, the sounds will help “navigate intense positional battles.” The game will also support the haptic feedback function of the DualSense gamepad.
Returnal is that “largest and most ambitious” project, about the development of which the team back in 2018. For his sake the studio later working on the battle royale Stormdivers. At the beginning of the year, the authors said that the studio employs about 80 people.
Housemarque will celebrate its 19th anniversary on July 25th. Since 2007, one of the oldest Finnish studios has been mainly developing games for the PlayStation. In 2010, she released the Dead Nation shooter on the PlayStation 3 (later it appeared on the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4), in 2013 (at the launch of the PlayStation 4) - Resogun. In 2016, Alienation appeared on the same platform, and in 2017, Matterfall. After the release of the commercially unsuccessful Nex Machina, the team swore off making arcade shooters, announcing the genre , and began to move in a new direction.
Returnal will be released only on PlayStation 5. Release dates have not been announced.
Source: 3dnews.ru