Housemarque’s ambitious new PS5 exclusive, Returnal gets even more ambitious by utilizing Dualsense’s new features most notably the adaptive triggers. The Dualsense is a marvel in its design from playing Astro’s Playroom; the adaptive triggers are a spectacular addition. In Returnal‘s most recent episode of Housecast, game director Harry Krueger describes in detail what players could expect in Returnal‘s gameplay.
Taking a huge leap from their arcade bullet hell games like Super Stardust HD and Resogun, Housemarque traverses to AAA territory combining their bullet hell bread and butter with a more rogue-like narrative experience. From the gameplay videos, there is a lot of focus on jumping, dodging, and the hookshot to negotiate through the projectiles these cosmic horrors are throwing at you.
This IP to brought to life by the labor of love from Housemarque’s creative team. There are fully customizable button mapping options to provide gamers with a unique experience. Players can opt for a more traditional control set, where the L2 button could be their dedicated aim button no matter how hard they press. For the more adventurous gamer, you could opt to check out their intuitive designs of the adaptive triggers.
By half-pressing the L2 button, you could do the traditional aim function while a full-press would trigger its alt-fire features. Just like the way in Hades where the player is given a choice on how their dodge would work, either by spamming the dodge or by well-timed dodges, I feel that the same choice is given to the player with the way you could choose to use the adaptive trigger. Personally, I’m excited by this novelty and could be a permanent feature when the novelty ends and the game remains.
Returnal is slowly becoming one of the games we’re looking forward to this coming March with its intriguing story and ingenious genre-blending design. Hades was one of our favorite games from 2020 and having a rogue-like element with Housemarque’s bullet hell pedigree could potentially be a winning combination. Returnal is a PS5 exclusive releasing on March 18, 2021.
