As a privileged owner of a powerful PC and both new consoles, I tend to use each of them for a specific purpose. The PS5, just like the PS4 before it, is an exclusives machine. I rarely, if ever, turn it on to play anything I can’t already play on other platforms.
The longest I’ve spent with my PS5 since I bought it wasn’t playing Demon’s Souls, Spider-Man, Ratchet & Clank, or any of the bigger games that might immediately come to mind, it was with Housemarque’s Returnal. I loved it so much, it ended up being my game of the year last year.
There’s a lot one could say about Returnal. Its narrative of living with regret and processing trauma presented through a sci-fi allegory of death and rebirth captivated me – not just in how well it was married to the game’s rogue-like nature of dying and restarting from the beginning, but because it never fully showed its hand. Even today, you’ll find most of those who played it divided on what’s actually going on in the story; which part is real sci-fi and which is the prison of the mind.
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