An amazing experience but not for everyone. Best in class sound design, shooting, graphics and overall game feel paired with a brutal gameplay loop that will punish you unfairly in a way I could only compare to something like Void Stranger where you can "lose" hours. It's a very satisfying game. As much as I say ♥♥♥♥ Sony for locking all their games back to being PS exclusive which means I will likely never buy sony titles again as I'm not a console person, I have to say that this is one you should not sleep on if you are watching the trailers and vibing with them as long as you are a determined player.

I don't really like roguelikes all that much, but I was delighted by Returnal's first two acts in spite of that. However, I also felt that the third and final act of the main campaign began to drag on a bit, and by the time I was doing my final runs through the Tower of Sisyphus introduced in the DLC, I was hoping that it would end soon. If you are like me and, despite not being a true roguelike enjoyer, you are always compelled to see every last bit of story that any given game has to offer, that means you'll need to run the Tower many times over, and that might become tiresome before too long. That was my experience of it anyway. Your mileage may vary depending on how you feel about roguelikes.

Still, even having said all of that, I conclude that even just the main campaign alone makes this game worth playing for just about everyone. Returnal looks, plays, and sounds absolutely brilliant, Jane Perry did a fantastic job in her portrayal of Selene, and the game's mysteries are so tempting that, even though I was getting worn down by some aspects of it, I just couldn't put the game down until I had finished the whole thing.

Surprisingly difficult, but you eventually learn. Ultimately I felt like the story was pretty limited, and most of the gameplay elements were put in place to slow you down to pad out the runtime. Like I was enjoying it... then I just hit a wall where I kept on seeing all the asset reuse, and how the difficulty and weird leveling system was just slowing down the game.