Selene has no idea why she keeps coming back to life and reliving her disastrous space-ship collision. Over the course of the first few hours of my playthrough, I was totally on board with Returnal’s riff on the roguelike format. Lovecraft, with fauna that resembles, curiously enough, the aliens of Edge of Tomorrow, which sort of is the movie equivalent of a roguelike video game. Something from the past is sprouting up to life for Selene on this planet that looks like the demon spawn of H.R. Or, rather, when she dies, you crash land again, and have to start over, again, and again, and again. But, the short of the story is, you’re an astronaut named Selene who crash lands on a planet that, for whatever spooky reason, will not let her die. Keep in mind, at the time of writing, despite the hours I’ve sunk into this ungodly difficult game, I’m still barely past the first boss. Returnal, like Hades, tries its best to make use of the prickly roguelike setup for an ambitious narrative. The act of dying and being reborn at the very start of the title was woven into the Greek Olympian narrative, meaning every time you washed up on the shores of the Underworld, you got a bit of story and character payoff too. Unlike the huge majority of roguelike games before it, Hades managed to accomplish the proverbial feat of walking and chewing gum at the same time (do people still say that?)-there was a story in Hades, and it was a damn good one. One title in this new genre, which is all of the sudden becoming way more mainstream than its esoteric roots, won a bunch of Game of the Year awards in 2020: Supergiant Games’ Hades. After all the time spent getting your ass kicked, that utter dominance is extremely cathartic. So although you’re dying constantly, there’s a feedback loop of reassessment, refinement, and growth that eventually results in you feeling unstoppably powerful. Since consoles are unimaginably more powerful than they were back in the early '90s, games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, two touchstones for the roguelike genre, are able to factor in novel mechanics such as levels designed at random (which in the gaming industry is called procedural generation), and allow players to retain what I guess are commonly known as power-ups (or boons, buffs, augments, upgrades, etc.) each time they die. Now, imagine that old logic applied to games of the modern day. Remember, back then, in games like Duck Tales or Contra, when you died, you really died? Until games started allowing you to save your progress, when you hit that game over screen, your game was really over. Although, if your family had a Super Nintendo, you may be acquainted with the genre already. It’s kind of tricky to explain what a roguelike video game is to someone who hasn’t already played one.
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