It’s also the inescapable sense that she’s a prisoner of her fate (Atropos being one of the three goddesses of fortune and destiny). It isn’t just that she finds her own body strewn around the environments (defeated gamers you can fight or avenge in online mode, just in case the “Dark Souls” parallels weren’t already clear from the punishing difficulty), or that Atropos is littered with audio scout logs in which some previous version of Selene can be heard talking to herself about peeling the skin off her bones and ascending to join the alien hive mind at the dark center of the game’s cryptic lore. Selene is haunted by the sense that she’s lost her place in a perpetual loop. And yet, Housemarque’s masterpiece - without question the best and most promising game of the brand-new console generation for the time being - takes things a step further by weaponizing that eerie sense of recognition against the player and protagonist alike. In a genre where déjà vu is more of a feature than a bug, it makes sense that “Returnal” doesn’t feel any pressure to disguise its genealogy.
When you die - which will happen so many times that death soon becomes as natural as stepping through a door - Selene is returned to the crash site and the procedurally generated planet around her rearranges its parts in a way that will seem perfectly natural to veterans of “Hades,” “Dead Cells” and other loop-based roguelikes. The slow wave of killer pearls it fires at you triggers sense memories of the bullet-hell shooters that dominated arcades in the days before developers like Housemarque (“Resogun”) brought them into the homes of hardcore gamers who prioritize sadistic design over bleeding edge graphics. Then you encounter the first of the two zillion enemies you’ll slaughter during some of the most vividly imaginative video game fights since “Horizon Zero Dawn” a wildebeest-like quadruped whose tentacled body glows turquoise against the dim landscape and anticipates the deep-sea vibe of much of Antropian life.
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