Without prior warning, developers Housemarque uploaded a ton of new video footage of their upcoming shooter-roguelike Returnal on early Tuesday morning. And unsurprisingly, it’s continuing to look like the neatest exclusive on the PS5 thus far.
Seven new trailers appeared on the official Housemarque YouTube channel this morning, covering the basics of the story, gameplay, combat loop, enemies and a developer-narrated walkthrough. It’s basically enough footage to work out whether Returnal might be your thing.
And for a lot of people, a third-person shooter masked as a bullet-hell game (which Housemarque has been doing so well for a very, very long time) is definitely their jam.
Not all of the footage is entirely new. Some of it is just Housemarque pushing out some of the footage that has been aired through Sony on their own official channel, which is entirely fair. It’s a bit weird that a developer as good as Housemarque only has a few thousand subscribers on YouTube, which seems wrong given this is the same studio behind the very good Alienation, Nex Machina, Super Stardust 96, Resogun and Super Stardust HD.
Returnal is out in 10 days, and honestly, it feels like something has to go substantially wrong for Housemarque not to stick the landing here. It’s got that flashy, high contrast look which will pair super nicely when playing in HDR. I like the approach to drip feeding the story, rather than just doing straight dumps of exposition. I love the way the audio is balanced when your HP drops. All of the gameplay videos being shot in 4K/60 FPS is a good sign too – Housemarque has always accommodated smooth gameplay in their titles, and given Sony has mandated all PS5 games must have a performance mode option, I’m confident Housemarque has got a good solution there.
Returnal launches as a PS5 exclusive on April 10. Unfortunately, being a PS5 exclusive also means retailers are selling it for $109 right now, but if you use the Amazon Shopping mobile app, you can apply a 10APP checkout code to bring the price down to $98. (Still pricey as hell, but it beats paying $109 or more.)
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