Returnal, the third-person action roguelike from Housemarque, throws players into a dangerous alien world. As they explore the twisted landscapes of the game's world, players will discover that the challenges that await them are fierce and often fatal. They will end up taking a lot of damage, which is where the game's many healing options will come into play.
The game has numerous ways to heal, from health picks-ups and alien tombs to taking a brief nap aboard the ship. Heal efficiency is what will dictate the effectiveness of all these healing methods. The higher the healing efficiency, the greater the amount of health that players will get from any healing method.
As Returnal focuses so heavily on the idea of death, rebirth, and being caught in a loop, the game has been designed to be extremely difficult. This means players will want to take as much advantage as they can while healing. To improve the Repair Efficiency of their suit, they will have a couple of options.
First, players will be able to find Malignant Objects scattered throughout Returnal's various levels and biomes. These purple items can provide players some kind of bonus, like an improved rate of repair efficiency. This will always come with a risk, however. The Malignant Object will also cause a malfunction that will increase the difficulty unless it can be cleansed using Ether.
Some Parasites that the player can find will also give the benefit of improving repair efficiency, but because everything around Parasites is randomly generated, farming a specific one is all but impossible. Buffing their character in these ways is the closest that players will be able to get to changing the difficulty in Returnal.
Players who are really struggling with the difficulty of Returnal may also want to take advantage of the Reconstructor. These strange alien machines will create a copy of their character and allow them to reload into the run from the point at which the copy was created. They can only do this once per run and will need to track down the randomly spawning Reconstructor to do so.
While Returnal is certainly a difficult game to play, it is also filled with smaller systems and nuances that players can take advantage of to make their runs easier. It will simply take time to learn the rules of the strange, alien world that Returnal contains.
Returnal is available now on PS5.
