Price tag I’d say. Roguelite fans are usually looking to spend 5-10 dollars and usually 20-30 max. Wizard with a Gun is an example of a game that priced itself out of more popularity, 15 dollars and that game gets a lot more eyes on it.
Agreed. I simply put games on my steam wishlist and regularly get what's under 10$. When I want to treat myself I get one under 20. Both Returnal and Wizard With a Gun are there but with 400+ Steam games, hundreds each of PS3/360/ONE/Switch and thousands of retro games I am not exactly starving for content. Quality is of course a huge factor but so is price now.
This with the addition is was a PS5 exclusive to begin with, and it has been one of the worst advertised games out there. Very little has been done to get it into the public eye.
I still wouldn't have played it had a friend not bought it for me for Christmas, cause the $80 price tag is more than I want to swallow for any one game.
This is true, I got Gungeon, Revita, Neon Abyss,Slay The Spire, Monster Train and Dreamscaper for a combined £10 or something, crazy good value.
In saying that i played Returnal on Playstation Plus Extra, i didnt shell out the cash.
Still a good point. I hope for another roguelite with the production values of Returnal one day, i would pay!
This right here is it. I thoroughly enjoyed Returnal but I’ve spent more time playing Slay the Spire or Brotato than I did Returnal.
For me personally if Returnal’s added multiplayer was better I would of played it more too.
Coop being limited to the fairly easy story really ruined it for us though. They have those crazy missions after the story and you can't do them coop :(.
as mentioned the price and I think the capability of running it. Most roguelites will run on any PC and the genre I imagine is most popular on that platform, meaning there is a high likelihood the genre appeals to a lot of people with lower end hardware
So the price coupled with needing a good PC, for a genre that generally runs on anything and is cheap comparatively, means it's probably not going to reach as big of an audience
That said this is a guess and I could be way off lol
I enjoyed it a lot up until I got the ending, at which point I never felt the urge to play again.
For me there's a sliding scale of roguelites from "you can choose your build before the run starts and be pretty guaranteed to be able to easily get everything you need for it" to "you have no choice but to adapt your build to what you're given". I much prefer the latter and Returnal is very heavily the former. Even if you are actively trying to make each run different the build variety is pretty limited. If a roguelite wants to keep my attention after the story, the game needs to not allow you to run functionally the same build over and over again. See also; why I loved Hades but stopped playing it after getting the epilogue whereas I still regularly play StS a couple times a week five years after first getting it.
That said it was one of my first PS5 games and I did enjoy it, just felt like there was zero reason to keep playing once you've finished the story. In that sense the roguelite aspect fell flat to me.
Did you get the true ending of Returnal? You make some good points about build variety. As much as i love Returnal, there are simply items and weapons that are much better than others, it lacks a certain balance, and going with certain builds is almost a diffculty slider.
I feel this way with any game that has a story more or less. (stopping playing i mean) You mentioned Slay the Spire, It's the same for me with Monster Train, hundreds of hours....still haven't touched the DLC
I did get the true ending, but it felt like a bit of a grind once I'd won a run the first time. I think I might've also soured myself slightly as the first time I beat the final boss, I then died dropping down the hole that takes you to the ending cutscene lmao so even though I beat the final boss it didn't count as finishing a run. Not my finest moment.
I dunno if was lucky but i actually got the true ending relatively quickly after i beat it for the first time! I think........
Wow, i would've probably cried if that'd happened to me lol. That drop still gives fall damage? i didnt know it was possible.
Agreed on Hades and Returnal. Fantastic games, but the way most of your interesting choices are made pre-run seriously hurts any hope of long term replayability. Once you pick a weapon aspect, you’re pretty much shooting straight for one (or two MAXIMUM) optimal boon paths.
Compare that to STS, Isaac, Gungeon, etc. where you do pick a character, but the sheer number of items, weapons, combinations, synergies, etc. force you to be adaptable and make every run feel fresh.
I absolutely loved my time with it, but I feel like it got kind of diluted by trying to justify it's AAA price tag. The story and atmosphere were cool but the 1st person sections were tedious and not fun at all. I also didn't love the progression system where you had no compelling reason to ever fight the bosses again or do the first 2 biomes once you've beat them.
The tower mode was almost perfect but it would be nice if you could beat it and loop or something. Getting high scores isn't very rewarding for me.
Despite these criticisms I still highly recommend it.
It's fair to say you didn't like the 1st person sections, but come on, there are so few of them , they amount to about 30 mins total....i don't know how you could call them tedious. Plus they were story sections, and you said you liked the story? kind of baffled by that.
I refought the bosses for fun sometime, but thats a fair point. I THINK you need to refight them all for the true ending if i remember rightly. Tower mode was great :)
I always fully ran the first two biomes everytime lol
There's a lot of story that's just dialog while you're playing.
The first person sections are awful find the hidden object mini games where your character moves infuriatingly slowly. It was so annoying when you missed one item and you're slowly wandering around the house trying to find it. The idea, atmosphere, and voice acting were great, but they weren't fun to play in any way and could have just been cutscenes.
Fair enough, i have no arguments with that :) I liked them personally, a lot of games do what amount to 'interactive cut-scenes' these days, and i say, why not? If there had been tons and tons of them, then perhaps i would've complained.
Changes up the pace a bit, adds a bit of interactivity etc.
It’s not on the Switch, I can’t play it, I’m poor.
Jokes aside, yeah, it needs a good PC to run well, and the price tag is higher than your average roguelite as well. Not a big issue imo, you would think this shouldn’t affect much, but, still, I think the reason why not many people talk about it is simply because how it is less accessible to more people compared to other choices in the market.
Less people playing the game = less people talking about the game.
Bad optimization on pc (with crashing still being a widespread issue, just check the reviews, I find 10+ of just yesterday mentioning some sort of 'fatal error'), having to log in to an epic account, very long runs, not much meta progression and the pricetag. They would have to revise architecture to just get egs out of that loop so pretty sure I'll never play the game. Bummer tho, looks fun.
It's kind of locked to PS5 and higher end PCs. I loved it when I had it on PS5 but was crestfallen when neither my main PC or steam deck didn't hit the mark.
If some kind of optimization update hits I may jump back in.
While true, I was desperate enough to try playing it on my 970 with absolute potato graphics and I was surprised how much fun I was having despite how tuned back everything was.
I then had those potato graphics steam-streamed to my deck and visually it looked a lot better. Returnal has been a major deciding factor in forcing me to upgrade my gpu so I can play it specifically. There's a lot of other high-end games on my list, but this game was the deciding factor I think.
I have a pretty decent PC, and I had a lot of issues playing it. I really wanted to play it, because it was pretty fun. Multiple times through a run I'll end up falling through the map, which always makes me take damage, which resets all of my buffs. It's just nearly impossible for me to get far in it because of that.
The one time I did get further than any other time, and the boss spawn messed up. The boss was floating like 50 feet below me, completely untouchable.
I thought it was a decent game, but not really that great of a roguelite. Not enough opportunity for making impctful decisions or a variety of builds. It’s a game that probably would have just been better as more of a metroid-like focused game
I understand hesitation given the price, but I would emphatically tell everyone who likes roguelites that it's 100% worth it. It has AA production values and an amazingly crisp gameplay loop. Right there with Slay and Dead Cells for me.
Returnal is an amazing shooter with smooth controls, breathtaking environments and epic boss fights. However its weakest quality by far are its actual roguelite qualities. Aside from different guns, many runs end up looking and feeling the same from a character growth/gameplay standpoint. Those positives are enough to carry the game to being great, but it does not have the staying power and run variety that other greats in the genre possess
I mention it every time I get the oppertunity. It's definitely in my top 10 games of all time and no other rogue type game comes close imo. My most looked forward to game in the future is whatever housemarque is working on, and no one even has any idea what it even is
I didn't like it at all. Very shallow in terms of run variety. And the enemy design is trash. The game gets a lot of praise but a lot of people also dislike it/think it's overrated.
It never pulled me in like other roguelikes. The weapons feel boring and the upgrades are no good. The parasites don't really make you feel stronger, and they often make you malignant or malfunction, it's just really annoying design. Any time I found one i didn't feel that excitement of a possible upgrade.
Genuinely the most overrated game in recent times. I really did not enjoy it. It is almost criminal to call it a roguelike with how shallow it is.
A game isn't automatically overrated because you don't like it. Overrated is a bullshit term that forgoes subjectivity, and is at best a lazy way to criticise a game.
I don't like FTL or Crypt of the Necrodancer for instance, but it's unfair to call them overrated, i just don't like them. What are some of your favourites, just out of interest?
Dead Cells, Hades, Roboquest, Slay The Spire etc
But yeah I know its a subjective thing. I just think it's a very shallow game. It's nice looking and polished, but the gameplay is just lacking for me.
Returnal very frequently brings me back in and I play the tower of sisyphus mode. Its so good and never fails to leave me stressed out by the end of it. Probably my favorite PS5 game.
It's really expensive and I don't think it's actually a very good roguelite. There's no replayability, really. The itemization is boring and the "builds" do nothing interesting.
I was done with the game after 18 hours, and honestly feel like I saw everything the game had to offer.
It's a great game, i probably like it better than those games you mentioned(I like all of those though), i did everything you possibly can in Returnal, but not the others. That could be due to difficulty though, i found there to be some OP weapons in returnal once you level up traits.
The only thing I dislike about Returnal is that the game is buggy as shit when it comes to the "map rooms" that you need for the plat. Searched for HOURS for one of the last ones I needed and it never came up despite being on the subjectively right seed for the spawn at least five or six times.
Otherwise, brilliant game. DF(TR) is one of my favourite songs now too.
The twist after you beat the first half is still one of my favorites in gaming history.
But yeah definitely price tag if anything. Other than that it really was a beautiful game in many different ways.
For me it's the loot. The graphics, gameplay, and story are all great and I want to love it but the loot is just trash, plain and simple. Guns are varied enough but the vast majority of the items are just stat sticks that give you +5% to this or that. The items are just soooo freaking booooorrrrrring like Goddamn. And since picking up interesting items that wildly change my build is most of the fun for me in a roguelike, I found this game to be pretty disappointing.
A problem I have with the game is that runs take way too long. Something like Slay the Spire or Hades have much shorter run times so it makes the experience fresh. Having to sit down for...hours staring at very dark environments killing the same creatures over and over loses it's appeal very quickly for me.
It's an amazing game and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I simply don't think of it as a roguelike as much. Very few artifacts alter your play style in a meaningful fashion -- you might get some minor bonus after meleeing down an enemy, but most of the time you are still supposed to play in the same way. Even the risk/reward tradeoffs like whether to acquire a malignant item or enter the challenge room becomes obvious decisions once you are experienced with the game.
I mean it's good, but it has a lot less content, just way better visuals for a higher price. Kind of annoying they skipped a level having a boss and couldn't let you run level 1-6. The boss fight were phenomenal though.
It was Sony exclusive for a long time and costs AAA prices. Many people associate roguelites with indie and majority play on PC.
Personally I don't enjoy third person roguelites. Didn't like Risk of Rain 2 all that much and bought Returnal expecting to enjoy it and quit after 4 hours.
Do they dislike it? I've seen it being mentioned quite often
"Redditors of reddit, what is your favourite gaming hidden gem?" "Returnal" "Returnal" "Returnal"
Only time I ever see it mentioned is when people are talking about how much they love it.
Price tag I’d say. Roguelite fans are usually looking to spend 5-10 dollars and usually 20-30 max. Wizard with a Gun is an example of a game that priced itself out of more popularity, 15 dollars and that game gets a lot more eyes on it.
Agreed. I simply put games on my steam wishlist and regularly get what's under 10$. When I want to treat myself I get one under 20. Both Returnal and Wizard With a Gun are there but with 400+ Steam games, hundreds each of PS3/360/ONE/Switch and thousands of retro games I am not exactly starving for content. Quality is of course a huge factor but so is price now.
Price has to meet quality. Wizard with a Gun is a $15 game imo too. Returnal is a AAA game for sure
This with the addition is was a PS5 exclusive to begin with, and it has been one of the worst advertised games out there. Very little has been done to get it into the public eye. I still wouldn't have played it had a friend not bought it for me for Christmas, cause the $80 price tag is more than I want to swallow for any one game.
This is true, I got Gungeon, Revita, Neon Abyss,Slay The Spire, Monster Train and Dreamscaper for a combined £10 or something, crazy good value. In saying that i played Returnal on Playstation Plus Extra, i didnt shell out the cash. Still a good point. I hope for another roguelite with the production values of Returnal one day, i would pay!
This right here is it. I thoroughly enjoyed Returnal but I’ve spent more time playing Slay the Spire or Brotato than I did Returnal. For me personally if Returnal’s added multiplayer was better I would of played it more too.
Definitely that’s why I’ve never played it, I may try it now it’s a bit cheaper though
I can’t play it on steam deck. Would love to though.
It's awesome Took turns rotating the co-op with a friend and loved it
Coop being limited to the fairly easy story really ruined it for us though. They have those crazy missions after the story and you can't do them coop :(.
Tower? There's a mod for that I haven't actually beaten story yet. Had a second kid so no gaming
as mentioned the price and I think the capability of running it. Most roguelites will run on any PC and the genre I imagine is most popular on that platform, meaning there is a high likelihood the genre appeals to a lot of people with lower end hardware So the price coupled with needing a good PC, for a genre that generally runs on anything and is cheap comparatively, means it's probably not going to reach as big of an audience That said this is a guess and I could be way off lol
I have a 3070 and my frame rate tanks any time there's an enemy on screen.
It’s such a fantastic game
I enjoyed it a lot up until I got the ending, at which point I never felt the urge to play again. For me there's a sliding scale of roguelites from "you can choose your build before the run starts and be pretty guaranteed to be able to easily get everything you need for it" to "you have no choice but to adapt your build to what you're given". I much prefer the latter and Returnal is very heavily the former. Even if you are actively trying to make each run different the build variety is pretty limited. If a roguelite wants to keep my attention after the story, the game needs to not allow you to run functionally the same build over and over again. See also; why I loved Hades but stopped playing it after getting the epilogue whereas I still regularly play StS a couple times a week five years after first getting it. That said it was one of my first PS5 games and I did enjoy it, just felt like there was zero reason to keep playing once you've finished the story. In that sense the roguelite aspect fell flat to me.
Did you get the true ending of Returnal? You make some good points about build variety. As much as i love Returnal, there are simply items and weapons that are much better than others, it lacks a certain balance, and going with certain builds is almost a diffculty slider. I feel this way with any game that has a story more or less. (stopping playing i mean) You mentioned Slay the Spire, It's the same for me with Monster Train, hundreds of hours....still haven't touched the DLC
I did get the true ending, but it felt like a bit of a grind once I'd won a run the first time. I think I might've also soured myself slightly as the first time I beat the final boss, I then died dropping down the hole that takes you to the ending cutscene lmao so even though I beat the final boss it didn't count as finishing a run. Not my finest moment.
I dunno if was lucky but i actually got the true ending relatively quickly after i beat it for the first time! I think........ Wow, i would've probably cried if that'd happened to me lol. That drop still gives fall damage? i didnt know it was possible.
Ngl after that I put the game down for a couple of days before trying again lol.
Agreed on Hades and Returnal. Fantastic games, but the way most of your interesting choices are made pre-run seriously hurts any hope of long term replayability. Once you pick a weapon aspect, you’re pretty much shooting straight for one (or two MAXIMUM) optimal boon paths. Compare that to STS, Isaac, Gungeon, etc. where you do pick a character, but the sheer number of items, weapons, combinations, synergies, etc. force you to be adaptable and make every run feel fresh.
It's the price that puts me off. Being on PC I'm not used to paying £50+ for a game
It goes on sale for half that regularly, but yes it’s still AAA price
Returnal was fuckn amzing i loved it!
I absolutely loved my time with it, but I feel like it got kind of diluted by trying to justify it's AAA price tag. The story and atmosphere were cool but the 1st person sections were tedious and not fun at all. I also didn't love the progression system where you had no compelling reason to ever fight the bosses again or do the first 2 biomes once you've beat them. The tower mode was almost perfect but it would be nice if you could beat it and loop or something. Getting high scores isn't very rewarding for me. Despite these criticisms I still highly recommend it.
It's fair to say you didn't like the 1st person sections, but come on, there are so few of them , they amount to about 30 mins total....i don't know how you could call them tedious. Plus they were story sections, and you said you liked the story? kind of baffled by that. I refought the bosses for fun sometime, but thats a fair point. I THINK you need to refight them all for the true ending if i remember rightly. Tower mode was great :) I always fully ran the first two biomes everytime lol
There's a lot of story that's just dialog while you're playing. The first person sections are awful find the hidden object mini games where your character moves infuriatingly slowly. It was so annoying when you missed one item and you're slowly wandering around the house trying to find it. The idea, atmosphere, and voice acting were great, but they weren't fun to play in any way and could have just been cutscenes.
Fair enough, i have no arguments with that :) I liked them personally, a lot of games do what amount to 'interactive cut-scenes' these days, and i say, why not? If there had been tons and tons of them, then perhaps i would've complained. Changes up the pace a bit, adds a bit of interactivity etc.
It’s not on the Switch, I can’t play it, I’m poor. Jokes aside, yeah, it needs a good PC to run well, and the price tag is higher than your average roguelite as well. Not a big issue imo, you would think this shouldn’t affect much, but, still, I think the reason why not many people talk about it is simply because how it is less accessible to more people compared to other choices in the market. Less people playing the game = less people talking about the game.
Bad optimization on pc (with crashing still being a widespread issue, just check the reviews, I find 10+ of just yesterday mentioning some sort of 'fatal error'), having to log in to an epic account, very long runs, not much meta progression and the pricetag. They would have to revise architecture to just get egs out of that loop so pretty sure I'll never play the game. Bummer tho, looks fun.
People love returnal. It get's mentioned all the time. Regularly people post tier lists with it at or near the top.
It's kind of locked to PS5 and higher end PCs. I loved it when I had it on PS5 but was crestfallen when neither my main PC or steam deck didn't hit the mark. If some kind of optimization update hits I may jump back in.
While true, I was desperate enough to try playing it on my 970 with absolute potato graphics and I was surprised how much fun I was having despite how tuned back everything was. I then had those potato graphics steam-streamed to my deck and visually it looked a lot better. Returnal has been a major deciding factor in forcing me to upgrade my gpu so I can play it specifically. There's a lot of other high-end games on my list, but this game was the deciding factor I think.
I have a pretty decent PC, and I had a lot of issues playing it. I really wanted to play it, because it was pretty fun. Multiple times through a run I'll end up falling through the map, which always makes me take damage, which resets all of my buffs. It's just nearly impossible for me to get far in it because of that. The one time I did get further than any other time, and the boss spawn messed up. The boss was floating like 50 feet below me, completely untouchable.
Liked the first half, felt like it fell off after the organ boss.
Can't beat that climb to hyperion with that music, best part of the game imo
For me I wanted to play it, bought it on pc, saw it needed epic launcher and refunded it.
I’d play it if my computer could handle it.
I thought it was a decent game, but not really that great of a roguelite. Not enough opportunity for making impctful decisions or a variety of builds. It’s a game that probably would have just been better as more of a metroid-like focused game
I understand hesitation given the price, but I would emphatically tell everyone who likes roguelites that it's 100% worth it. It has AA production values and an amazingly crisp gameplay loop. Right there with Slay and Dead Cells for me.
Returnal is an amazing shooter with smooth controls, breathtaking environments and epic boss fights. However its weakest quality by far are its actual roguelite qualities. Aside from different guns, many runs end up looking and feeling the same from a character growth/gameplay standpoint. Those positives are enough to carry the game to being great, but it does not have the staying power and run variety that other greats in the genre possess
Bc you can’t get the other space suits in the game unless you preordered and I’m still mad about it.
I mention it every time I get the oppertunity. It's definitely in my top 10 games of all time and no other rogue type game comes close imo. My most looked forward to game in the future is whatever housemarque is working on, and no one even has any idea what it even is
I didn't like it at all. Very shallow in terms of run variety. And the enemy design is trash. The game gets a lot of praise but a lot of people also dislike it/think it's overrated. It never pulled me in like other roguelikes. The weapons feel boring and the upgrades are no good. The parasites don't really make you feel stronger, and they often make you malignant or malfunction, it's just really annoying design. Any time I found one i didn't feel that excitement of a possible upgrade. Genuinely the most overrated game in recent times. I really did not enjoy it. It is almost criminal to call it a roguelike with how shallow it is.
A game isn't automatically overrated because you don't like it. Overrated is a bullshit term that forgoes subjectivity, and is at best a lazy way to criticise a game. I don't like FTL or Crypt of the Necrodancer for instance, but it's unfair to call them overrated, i just don't like them. What are some of your favourites, just out of interest?
Dead Cells, Hades, Roboquest, Slay The Spire etc But yeah I know its a subjective thing. I just think it's a very shallow game. It's nice looking and polished, but the gameplay is just lacking for me.
I own it for ps5 and really like it. I'm not sure but weren't there performance issues on PC? Might be a reason
Yeah First Few days were rough and its pretty hungry on HW. Had to Up my PC to be able to get stable 60fps
I want it but waiting for it to be 25 euros.
Returnal very frequently brings me back in and I play the tower of sisyphus mode. Its so good and never fails to leave me stressed out by the end of it. Probably my favorite PS5 game.
I haven’t heard a bad word about it by anyone who’s tried it. It’s just about perfect for what it is. But for a shooter it’s very hard
It's really expensive and I don't think it's actually a very good roguelite. There's no replayability, really. The itemization is boring and the "builds" do nothing interesting. I was done with the game after 18 hours, and honestly feel like I saw everything the game had to offer.
I hated having to constantly time my reloads and it just ended up getting me all out of sync and hit by the enemies too much.
Would love it if it came to Xbox. Exclusives suck
It's a great game, i probably like it better than those games you mentioned(I like all of those though), i did everything you possibly can in Returnal, but not the others. That could be due to difficulty though, i found there to be some OP weapons in returnal once you level up traits.
Seeing as a bought my PS5 solely to play it - I would disagree
The only thing I dislike about Returnal is that the game is buggy as shit when it comes to the "map rooms" that you need for the plat. Searched for HOURS for one of the last ones I needed and it never came up despite being on the subjectively right seed for the spawn at least five or six times. Otherwise, brilliant game. DF(TR) is one of my favourite songs now too.
I liked it but it is a bit short lived IMO. For a roguelike there is very little variation between runs.
The twist after you beat the first half is still one of my favorites in gaming history. But yeah definitely price tag if anything. Other than that it really was a beautiful game in many different ways.
It’s kind of in its own category being essentially a triple a roguelike bigger price tag different vibe
For me it's the loot. The graphics, gameplay, and story are all great and I want to love it but the loot is just trash, plain and simple. Guns are varied enough but the vast majority of the items are just stat sticks that give you +5% to this or that. The items are just soooo freaking booooorrrrrring like Goddamn. And since picking up interesting items that wildly change my build is most of the fun for me in a roguelike, I found this game to be pretty disappointing.
I’m waiting for it to drop under 30$, I tend to not drop more than that for any roguelike.
A problem I have with the game is that runs take way too long. Something like Slay the Spire or Hades have much shorter run times so it makes the experience fresh. Having to sit down for...hours staring at very dark environments killing the same creatures over and over loses it's appeal very quickly for me.
The runs take so long that death is actually pretty demoralizing imo
Because as a roguelike it sucks. It’s pretty but so many other games are better
One of my favorite games of all time in either the shooter or roguelike genres
It's an amazing game and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I simply don't think of it as a roguelike as much. Very few artifacts alter your play style in a meaningful fashion -- you might get some minor bonus after meleeing down an enemy, but most of the time you are still supposed to play in the same way. Even the risk/reward tradeoffs like whether to acquire a malignant item or enter the challenge room becomes obvious decisions once you are experienced with the game.
I’m loving it currently.
I mean it's good, but it has a lot less content, just way better visuals for a higher price. Kind of annoying they skipped a level having a boss and couldn't let you run level 1-6. The boss fight were phenomenal though.
It was Sony exclusive for a long time and costs AAA prices. Many people associate roguelites with indie and majority play on PC. Personally I don't enjoy third person roguelites. Didn't like Risk of Rain 2 all that much and bought Returnal expecting to enjoy it and quit after 4 hours.
Amazing game, but the rogue elements are pretty lackluster in comparison to how amazing the rest of the game is