The article contains spoilers for Returnal.I’ve always been a fan of roguelike games. One of my first PlayStation Plus downloads was an indie known as Tower of Guns, where you blast your way through the titular tower, only to start again each time you die. It hooked me immediately — I spent pretty much an entire summer holiday shooting through the tower’s many floors, only to get kicked back down to the start with each defeat.From the BacklogEvery gamer has a backlog — and that’s no different for us at TechRadar Gaming. From the Backlog is a series about overdue first-plays, revisiting classics, returning to online experiences, or rediscovering and appreciating established favorites in new ways. Read the full series here.That type of cyclical gameplay loop just scratches a deep itch in my brain. I’m the kind of player who plays carefully and hoards items for moments that may never appear. However, the high stakes of roguelike games have always given you focus, while the temporary nature of your loadout, abilities, and progress encourages experimentation. In most story-driven games, player deaths have few consequences – dying in God of War or Control might set you back a few minutes, but you’ll typically carry on as if nothing happened. In contrast, the roguelike genre is defined by hard resets with each death. The issue is that it’s hard to tell an engaging story when you’re constantly sending the player back to square one.But what if dying was part of the story? That’s the question at the centre of Returnal, the 2021 roguelike third-person shooter from Finnish developer Housemarque that launched as a PS5 exclusive before making its way to Windows. Crucially, Returnal makes its cycle of death and reawakening the central theme of its dense, mysterious narrative. This summer, about a decade after downloading Tower of Guns, PS Plus delivered me another unforgettable roguelike experience with Returnal – and while I had heard some high praise for its gameplay, I wasn’t prepared for just how much its story would affect me. Keep reading for my take on why Returnal is worth returning to. Life on loop(Image credit: Sony)Returnal follows space-farer Selene Vassos, an astronaut and explorer who crash-lands on the uncharted world of Atropos. After emerging from the wreckage of her ship, Helios, players guide Selene through the jungles and ruins of Atropos, fighting through rooms of alien animals and humanoids to track the ‘White Shadow’ distress beacon she hopes to use to escape. In theory, you can do this all in one life – but Returnal quickly makes it clear that everything on Atropos wants to kill you. And unless you’ve got the reaction times of an Olympic gymnast, something on Atropos is going to kill you. When you do eventually fall to one of the planet’s many hostile creatures, the game flashes through a series of visions before Selene wakes up at the crash site, which becomes the starting point for each subsequent run. In fact, the screen displays the message ‘Helios Abandoned’ each time you leave camp, to really set the mood. On these follow-up attempts, you’ll come across corpses – your own corpses. Versions of Selene that didn’t make it to the White Shadow are dotted around Atropos, sometimes accompanied by voice recorders that begin to explain the planet’s war-torn history.SonySonySonyThe core gameplay of Returnal is that of a competent third-person shooter with light movement mechanics. It’s Dark Souls meets Titanfall meets Resogun after three cups of coffee – you move quickly, shoot quickly, and dodge dozens of on-screen projectiles. The controls are tight; the game feels incredibly responsive, fast but never floaty.Various gameplay aspects come together to make Returnal feel addictive and alive. The game offers ten satisfying weapons, each with a few dozen modifiers, and carefully designed combat rooms that are rearranged with a dash of random number generation (RNG) on each new run. About a third of the way through the game, you unlock the best grappling hook in gaming since Just Cause 3, which is naturally a huge plus. And while Returnal can be punishingly hard – looking at the PlayStation trophies reveals just under a third of players have beaten the first boss – it’s always incredibly fun to play. Even after beating the main game, I spent a few weeks scaling the Tower of Sisyphus, the endless mode added with a free DLC in 2022.Our Returnal review has a more detailed breakdown of the game’s mechanics, but it’s the game’s story that, in my opinion, makes it a must-play. I was quickly hooked by Returnal’s enigmatic premise. It takes a relatively small idea – making the gameplay loop an essential part of the story – and runs with it, filling every spare moment with symbolism and intrigue. An impossible Apollo-era astronaut stalks Selene around Atropos; Selene’s house appears in the overgrowth, seemingly plucked from its place on Earth and becoming a doorway to surreal cutscenes, and all the while Selene’s visions become infected with robotic beings and eldritch tentacles.Mystery and mythology(Image credit: Sony)Being a fan of games like Outer Wilds and Firewatch, Returnal’s approach to scavenging lore and building your own interpretation of the narrative really clicked with me. The game has a Nolan-esque way of revealing its story (only with much better female characters). Its twists and turns work their way through the player’s expectations like the tentacles that plague Selene’s post-mortem hallucinations, and many of the big twists are hinted at from the beginning. The first comes halfway, when Selene finds the White Shadow escape signal, is rescued and returned to Earth, lives a normal life, passes away, and wakes up… back on Atropos. The second comes at the end of the game, when it’s revealed that, back on Earth, Selene crashed into a lake after seeing the Astronaut that follows her around Atropos on a bridge, her own ‘white shadow’. In the back seat, a young boy is trapped – Helios, abandoned. YouTube essayists and Reddit commenters have spent the last five years analysing this game to Atropos and back – some theories suggest that the planet is a manifestation of Selene’s guilt over the crash, while others point to the ghostly astronaut as an avatar of her emotionally distant mother, Theia.(Image credit: Sony)Others point to Returnal’s layered Greek mythology references – Selene and Theia are named for the goddesses of the Moon and sky, with Atropos being the goddess of destiny. If you’re a lore-obsessive like me, now’s a great time to explore. To me, Returnal is a fundamentally abstract piece of art that allows its themes to resonate with one another beyond the confines of a rigid narrative structure – at times, it feels like a sort of conceptual web, tying up ideas of motherhood, trauma, ambition, and release with no prescribed interpretation. Not bad for a shoot-em-up. In fact, I found Returnal genuinely moving. In the second half of the game, as you fight through frozen wastelands and infinite ocean depths, Selene goes totally mad, talking only in prayer and prophecy. Actor Jane Perry does a phenomenal job of making her character seem both tragically lost and genuinely enlightened. Late-game cutscenes and lore drops put the focus on how much Selene gave up to become an astronaut, again tying this story to roguelike gameplay as Housemarque links sacrifice to pushing forward.Housemarque released its latest game, Saros, earlier this year. Like Returnal, Saros offers Housemarque’s iconic third-person bullet hell gameplay and cryptic environmental storytelling – the difference is I won’t be waiting 5 years to play it.