Returnal PC review: Live, die, try again

When Returnal launched in 2021, shortly after the PlayStation 5 debuted, it had a lot to live up to as one of the early releases made specifically for the new generation of consoles. Although it was the first AAA title for Sony-owned developer Housemarque, it managed to do just that. It received favourable reviews, picked up several notable year-end accolades, made the shortlist for Stuff’s 2021 Game of the Year award, and hit the Stuff Top Ten Games page where it still sits.

Now, two years later, Returnal has made the jump to PC. And just like the PlayStation Studios games that came before – God of War immediately springs to mind – Returnal’s PC port is relatively well-optimised and adds more than enough graphical customisation options to satisfy PC gamers. It also implements these graphical customisation options in some of the best ways possible. We had a good time in case you couldn’t tell. Let’s unpack why.

The beginning’s a good place to start

We reviewed Returnal on PS5 at launch and since most of the story elements and core gameplay mechanics are the same, we’ll be focusing on what the PC port gets right. But we suppose a brief recap for the newcomers wouldn’t hurt.

Returnal sees players filling the space suit of Selene Vassos, a deep space scout who has just crash-landed on the alien planet Atropos. Well, it’s alien for you, the player and Selene, not for the ‘Xenotype race’ that used to live there or the creatures that await. With her ship destroyed and her objective to find the ‘White Shadow’ signal clear (to her at least), you set out only to discover your own corpse before long.

Luckily, you recorded a handy audio log before you died that gives some exposition, like the fact that you’re prone to memory loss. Not long after, you’ll meet a big tentacled creature and die rather quickly, only to relive your crash and wake up back where you started. You better get used to that.

But that’s just what’s going on at the surface level. Even though this is a two-year-old game, we aren’t going to rob you by spoiling the ending (or endings). But you should at least be aware of the subtextual themes and hidden nuances that draw you deeper into the already engaging narrative helped along by the vocal performance of Selene’s voice actor Jane Perry.

Those themes and nuances will reveal themselves to you as you progress. Although, in Returnal, that doesn’t always feel like you’re moving forward. They’re not always as obvious as the game’s nods to Greek mythology so it’s worth keeping your eyes open as they’ll help you better understand the ending(s).

Get your mouth around that

As we said in our first review, Returnal is a roguelike sci-fi psychological horror 3D bullet-hell third-person shooter. That’s a mouthful, let’s break it down.

‘Roguelike’ games usually involve (among other things) randomised environment generation, permadeath, and hack-and-slash gameplay. All of those are present here to some degree. Returnal’s ‘sci-fi psychological horror’ genre should be more familiar, especially if you enjoy films like Shutter Island, although Event Horizon might be a better comparison here.

3D bullet-hell describes pretty much what you’d expect – tons of bullets coming at you from all angles. The slight difference here is these bullets are pretty with fancy particle effects. Don’t let that draw you into a false sense of security. They still hurt. A lot. And finally, ‘third-person shooter’ should be obvious – you’re looking at yourself from over your own shoulder.

All of those descriptors combine to form the polarising core gameplay loop of Returnal. Polarising, because the game doesn’t have a difficulty setting, it’s always set to ‘hard’. This can make the constant dying, losing everything but your persistent upgrades, and starting from the beginning a little tedious and annoying. That cycle can also delay your review by a few weeks.

If you’re struggling with a particular section – and struggle you certainly will – you can bring in another player through the co-op mode carried over from the game’s PS5 post-launch updates.

If that’s not your style, you could try enabling aim assist. But using aim assist while playing on mouse and keyboard is the closest you can get to cheating without actually cheating. But hey, we can’t all be pro gamers, no judgement here (alright, maybe a little).

You do still have the option of playing with Sony’s DuelSense PS5 controller to enjoy its immersive haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. But in a game like this, a mouse’s superior aiming precision was appreciated. That being said, mouse and keyboard aren’t the only things to make this PC port stand above its console predecessor.

Graphically gorgeous, for a price

Returnal on PC is every bit as wonderful to look at as the PS5 version. If you’ve got a capable PC, it can look even better. But that’s not going to be possible for most folks. Even though the minimum PC RAM requirements were halved before the game launched – from 32GB down to 16GB – the average PC might struggle without some help.

Our test bench featured an AMD RX 5700XT GPU and an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU paired with 16GB of fast DDR4 RAM. Even with our relatively old GPU, we still managed to tweak some settings and achieve a (mostly) stable framerate of around 90fps with only minor knocks to image quality.

We did need some help to get there. If your ageing PC is in the same boat, you’ll find help from the various resolution scaling options supported. Those include Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, Intel’s XeSS, or generic options like variable rate shading (VSR) or dynamic super resolution (DSR).

Nvidia GPU owners should stick to DLSS, although it’s the older DLSS 2, not the new version. Unfortunately for us (and other AMD GPU owners) Returnal’s FSR implementation also uses the old version of the tech so we found better image quality and performance using VRS.

We arrived at that conclusion by playing around with Returnal’s graphics options and using its built-in benchmark tool. In the graphics menu, you’ll notice the world you’ve just paused in the background with the visual settings menu as an overlay. As you change the settings, you can see their in-game effects in real time.

For a more in-depth look at your PC’s performance, Returnal’s benchmark tool runs through several simulations that tend to weigh a little heavier on your system than standard gameplay. Each scenario is designed to test different system metrics. When it’s finished, it will display how your PC handled each test, the overall results, and what’s causing your system’s bottlenecks (if you have any).

As it did on the PS5, Returnal on PC offers ray-tracing support for some reflections and shadows. We played around with those settings on a separate PC with an Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU and an Intel 12th-gen Core i9-12900K CPU paired with 32GB of DDR5 RAM. While there’s no denying that ray-traced reflections and shadows look fantastic, we still prefer a smoother gameplay experience. So we opted to turn them off, in favour of higher fps.

Our PC experience wasn’t completely smooth sailing. We did notice persistent micro-stutters during testing on our AMD PC. They were most noticeable during the game’s most intense stages, like boss fights, perhaps the worst time for anything to go wrong.

We’d like to blame the micro-stutters for the reason it’s taken us so long with this review but most of our deaths were by our own hand (or lack of skill). Still, it’s an annoying problem that will hopefully be fixed in a patch before long. Maybe support for Nvidia and AMD’s new tech will be added as well.

Over and above the graphical improvements, Returnal on PC also offers robust audio settings (including hardware-based ray-traced audio on Nvidia GPUs), and support for 21:9 (wide) and 32:9 (super wide) aspect ratios if that’s your style.

Returnal PC verdict

Returnal remains one of Sony’s strongest titles and has greatly benefitted from PlayStation Studios’ superbly-polished port to PC. It will obviously perform best on high-end systems but even modest PCs will manage to run it thanks to internal optimisations and a wide array of video options.

If you’re already a fan of the roguelike genre, Returnal is right up your alley and if you haven’t played it already you shouldn’t think twice about the R900 pricetag. You’ll get more than your money’s worth out of it.

If you aren’t a fan of the genre (like us going in) we’d still recommend giving Returnal a try. At worst, you’ll spend two hours in a beautiful alien world before you refund it and move on to the next game. But you’re far more likely to pour hours into filling out your codex, finding collectables, and perfecting your cycle as you defy death by dodging between hundreds of beautiful killing orbs.