Couldn’t agree more with what SallaV said. I think people are expecting a totally different game than what this really is. They probably should have put up a demo for this, because the majority of the people spending €80 on their pre-order won’t even have the patience to finish the 2nd Act. Demon’s Souls / Dark Souls is easy in comparison because you can over-level and thereby reduce the difficulty and you keep your progress (except souls) between deaths + you can spec your character to suit your playstyle.
In Returnal you lose everything when you die or when you leave the game. You can’t even pick your weapon because everything is randomized. You can’t “cheat” it by backing up your save game either, because you get wiped out when you exit the game and will respawn at the start of the act. It’s very punishing because you need to run through large portions of the game again if you die, and some enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits.
I never heard about this in the game’s marketing materials which seems like the first thing they should tell consumers. If you want a challenge, this game is great, and I’m all for it because we don’t get enough of these nowadays. But it will definitely take most players by surprise, especially if you never completed a Roguelike game before.
Housemarque / PlayStation Studios didn’t do a great job at promoting the game for what it really is – in trailers and gameplays it looked like a semi-story driven arcade-style 3rd person shooter with maybe a bit of horror/survival elements. When in fact it’s a “Roguelike” genre. Rogue’like’ is probably not the right genre either, because it’s more ‘Rogue’ and less ‘like’… in some Roguelikes (e.g. Hades) you at least have a hub area where you can upgrade some stuff between deaths and you retain some useful leveling that gives you an advantage on the next try. But in Returnal you get none of that.
It’s going to be at least 8/10 difficulty platinum and quite an annoying grind for the gold trophies to complete the databases in each world (because the game is randomized it can take a while).
Returnal is closer to Wolfenstein 2 Mein Leben difficulty, but with a randomized map each time. There are no difficulty options so it will be the same hardcore experience for everyone.
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