My 218th Platinum, Returnal (took roughly 76h).
Damn!
I heard stories about this one, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for it.

Returnal is designed to be hard and IS hard.
Housemarque has merged permadeath, ever changing maps (you die and the whole map will change), randomly spawned loot that can break or make a run, a 3rd person shooter that is very responsive and reactive, Dark Souls like bosses and lots and lots and lots of glowing balls of death. Which makes every run unpredictable, challenging and new (no matter how good or experienced you are).

 I was surprised how easy I got through all the bosses but I know it was mostly due to luck. Getting the right drops like the Pylon weapon and damage reduction augments and artifacts early just made the run go smoother. I could fire once or twice and then run around dodging all the glowing balls of death while still damaging over time.
I beat every boss first time except Phrike which I got on my second attempt but it did take many many attempts to get through each biome to each boss.

The graphics, atmosphere, music, responsiveness and the controller features (haptic feedback and adaptive triggers) all hit that right spot that makes the game feel engaging with a sense of dread, that if you die or make a mistake then you begin the cycle again.

The story is quite unsettling.
At face value the story seems to be a sci-fi space adventure gone wrong when you crash land on an alien infested planet.
My take on it though from all the collectibles, house and hospital visits is that you are possibly in a coma due to the crash and the whole adventure is in your head.
So for me it seems more psychological and up to the players interpretations and the developer hinted towards as much.
My only grip with the story is it didn’t have a definitive conclusion and left me with more questions than answers.

My other gripe with the game was the ever changing world. It was perfect for the campaign playthrough and its was seemlessly awesome.
The issue I have with it, is the damn collectibles.
Collectibles spawn in specific rooms but those rooms are random. It could take 100 runs of a biome to spawn the room and you could die in the room with it or just not notice it at all. Which would mean you would have to do possibly another 50-100 runs looking for the room for that one collectible.  So there is no guide to follow to find them but there is very little more rewarding than spending 15h looking for that one collectible and then you notice it in the distance 😀

Difficulty rating,  a 8.5/10, that’s the rating PowerPyx gave it due to the difficult nature of the bosses and the game over all. I on the other hand would give the campaign a 4-5/10 but would give those damn collectibles a 10/10 

Fun rating, a 6/10. I loved this game and the satisfaction of a little bit of progression is hard to explain. I would have rated it higher if those collectibles weren’t random