Returnal's Story Only Works Because You Have To Suffer Through It

After accidentally hyping up fans for a sequel, Returnal developer Housemarque announced that a graphic novel adaptation called Returnal: Fallen Asteria is coming this October. I’m looking forward to seeing how the book handles the story, especially since it’s being created by the same narrative team that wrote Returnal, but even as a huge fan of both the game and graphic novels I must admit I’m apprehensive. The gameplay and narrative structure of Returnal is such a big part of its deeply affecting story, and I’m not sure how an 88-page book is going to recreate that.

If you haven’t played Returnal, please don’t read any further. I’m generally pretty dismissive about how uptight people are about spoilers, but Returnal’s story has to be experienced first hand to really understand what it’s about. What begins as a typical sci-fi story about an astronaut, Selene, crash-landed on an alien planet called Atropos, slowly reveals itself to be deeply personal psychological horror about grief and guilt. Much like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, Atropos is a metaphorical representation of Selene’s psyche. But how you discover that fact plays an important role in how you understand the story’s major themes and big twist.

Returnal Is An Essential Roguelike For God of War Valhalla Fans

If you were hooked by Valhalla's approach to rougelike loops and storytelling, you have to play Returnal next.

Returnal has a reputation for being a tough-as-nail bullet-hell style roguelike, a reputation that it fully deserves. The roguelike loop is built into the narrative. Selene ventures out in the wilds of Atropos looking for a way to get back home, and every time she dies time reverses back to the moment she first emerged from her crashed ship. That’s more than a narrative conceit to justify it being a roguelike, it’s an important function of how you experience the story. In Hades, Zagreus is always making incremental progress towards his ultimate goal, and gets to celebrate little victories along the way. In Returnal, every defeat yanks Selene back to the start, her progress lost and her will to go on more tarnished. It’s Sisyphean for the character, and devastating for the player too.

We eventually come to understand that Selene’s time loop is a prison of her own making, and that her inability to escape is a reflection of her inability to cope with something terrible she’s done. She is punishing herself in this fantasy of dying over and over on a monster-filled hell planet, and as we bash our heads against Returnal’s brutally hard combat encounters, we share in her agony. We have to suffer with Selene in order to truly understand her story. It’s one of the most compelling stories ever told in a video game, but that’s largely because of the way the gameplay experience feeds into and elevates the narrative.

There are very few comic books that have challenged me, let alone made me suffer. Grant Morrison’s highly experimental and deeply self-indulgent book The Invisibles comes to mind. It’s incredibly divisive, difficult to parse, exhausting to get through, and it’s often credited with saving/ruining people’s lives. You can find more examples in literature that manage to do what Returnal does well. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski was harder to get through than any game I’ve ever played and it often made me feel hopeless. Similarly, I’d rather be trapped in a time loop on Atropos than read Ania Ahlborn’s Brother ever again.

People often talk about unadaptable books - novels that just can’t work in any other medium. House of Leaves is one, others include Blood Meridian, Infinite Jest, The Dark Tower series, and, until very recently, Dune. As we enter the era of video game adaptations, it’s interesting to think about which game stories are truly unadaptable. I’m excited to see how the Housemarque team translates Returnal into a new medium, but unless you experience it first hand by playing the game, I don’t think there’s any other medium that can do Selene’s story justice.

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