Six years later, the PS5 is still light on exclusives — but this space-age shooter is an absolute must-play

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.

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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.