Topic: Returnal

@render I did, thank you. Managed to maintain my record of every boss beaten first try. I realised towards the end that I'd been unconsciously dancing right on the edge of a moving steam of bullets, so I guess I was in the zone. Not even looking at Selene, but aware of everything going on around her.

That ending didn't explain much though!

@Abarth_71 Ha ha yup that happened to me too. If I'm on a good run then I actively avoid those challenge rooms as I usually come out of them way worse than I went in, but forcing you to do one as there is no way back is just cruel.

@Voltan Cheers, I will definitely try and get that far then before joining that discussion. I'm in no hurry to finish this game but I also can't wait to find out what the deal with the story is.

@PossibLeigh You were definitely in a zone that I couldn't get into then. I'll hopefully have better luck next time but think I was concentrating too much on hitting it when I should have spent more time just avoiding things and accepted that it was going to be a war of attrition.

@render Once you finish Act 2, you shouldn't have any problems with Act 3 - just need to do a few more runs

@render I have a feeling nothing in the story is going to get a straight explanation. We're in Lost territory here, unfortunately.

Really tempted to pick this game up for the weekend. Should finish Nier Replicant this evening. Next big game will be SMT 3. Thinking this might be a good bet for something to play for shorter sessions as I work through a longer game over a few months.

The only true PS5 games I've played so far are Demon's Souls and Astro's Playroom. Looks like this is a lot of fun, if not slightly frustrating at times. From what I hear there's some quite cool Dual Sense stuff going on in this game?

@mcdreamer It's a good game, but maybe not a great choice if you want something to play in short bursts, unless they do add a save state. Runs can last for a good few hours. Clearing biomes 4 to 6 last night took about 3 hours, If not longer.

I'm sure the others can give you a more useful appraisal. The dualsense stuff is very cool.

@mcdreamer Fair warning - this game is hard to put down if you're into it.
And yeah, the Dual Sense stuff is arguably the best yet, next to Astro's Playroom.

@mcdreamer I'd agree with those previous comments. If you are looking for something to play in short bursts this is not the game you are looking for. Your runs can last from 5 minutes (getting killed in the first room), to a good few hours (clearing through 3 biomes before hitting the boss) made harder to predict due to the unpredictable nature of the room order / items found.

If you end up liking it as much as we all seem to do then you are definitely going to want to keep playing to see this through. Plus the DS stuff is really really good, and the 3D sound excellent too. I can totally recommend this game.

@PossibLeigh @Voltan @render Thanks all! I imagine that SMT 3 might take me a couple of months to beat, so having a few days of Returnal here and there with its longer run times is probably OK relative to the total run time of SMT 3! Also don't mind if Returnal totally takes over from SMT if I'm that into it Glad to hear that the Dual Sense stuff is very well done too. Will definitely be back here with my thoughts if I do decide to pick up the game.

@mcdreamer Haha, it sounds like your mind is made up! Welcome to the madness, sir.

Well, when you get the game.

@Voltan Is it common to not find one of the six artifacts on a run? I've just realised they randomly appear and, as someone who doesn't care about trophies at all, that sounds a bit of a faff.

@PossibLeigh It seems that some of them are random, while others are not.
3 and 5 seem to be in a specific place that's in the exact same spot every time.
1, 2, 4 and 6 are in optional rooms but they're all just off the main path and they seem to be quite common. 6 was the only one I'm certain was not there on a full run of biome 6 I did but I found it on the next one (there were also a couple runs that got me killed early so I can't say if it was there or not).

So overall I'd say they're pretty easily found, especially if you know where to look for 3 (which took some time for me as I didn't) and 5.

@Voltan Ah, excellent, thank you! That doesn't sound too bad at all. I don't mind doing a whole biome wander as long as I know it's not fruitless.

@PossibLeigh Yeah, I definitely did more failed runs of the Citadel than I needed to, but I ended up finding all the glyph ciphers while at it so it wasn't wasted anyway (I believe I still need some audio logs from there though)

@render Thanks for your comment on the vid (and bothering to watch!)

So far I think that the bosses are often easier than a lot of the general fights you get. With the bosses I've done, you pretty much only have to focus on them and avoiding the huge number of orbs often isn't too bad. Ones that turn to up close, melee fights can be more problematic.

Whereas the general runs can see you massively overwhelmed with turrets, flying enemies, and then heavy hitters too. It just feels a slightly odd balance.

Those ice sentinels in biome 5 are absolutely slaughtering me with their teleport/melee move.

@Thrillho Yeah they really do add to the fun those sentinels. It does look like you manage your excitement / fear quite well when your are in a boss fight. I'm just in a mad panic and focus too much on doing damage rather than avoiding taking damage. I've died far more times during a general run though than against the bosses so you definitely have a point.

@Kidfried Wow, I’m still at a total of 2 minor glitches (not counting the save corruption thing) after finishing the game (both endings).

@Kidfried Oof, thankfully I’ve not had any crashes but it’s just unnecessary to not have the game auto save like Dark Souls. Therefore you can’t save scum and it protects against these crashes.

@Kidfried Ah no, I can totally sympathise with you there. I've had a few crashes so far with 2 biggish ones, the first happening when I was on a good run and the second happening when I'd just started but that eventually led to my save getting corrupted when I tried to shutdown the console. It's brutal when it happens but the game is so good that I brushed it off and carried on. It's tough to know when it's going to happen again though.

@nessisonett That is a good idea although I guess people could still save scum if they restored from the cloud? And I guess you could still get the save file corruption if it's writing to disk when a crash happens, but then it must be writing to disk a lot anyway. Every time you unlock an item / trait etc then it will have to record those actions.

@render I mean, the obvious solution would just be for the game to not crash. And not corrupt saves 😂

@nessisonett Ha ha yep that would work also 😆