Nearly two years after the release of Returnal for the consoles, it arrives on Steam for PC. Thanks Sony!
Control-wise, it plays just fine with a keyboard and mouse. It is a standard third-person shooter with dash mechanics; I feel like there is no real way to screw this up any more.
Performance will be the most fluctuating part about your experience. Reading online, some people have no issues on lower-spec hardware, whereas others struggle with the top-of-the-line kit. I was somewhere in the middle. Make sure you’ve got nothing else in the background when playing this, as it will be taxing on your hardware and you need as much performance as possible, especially on older hardware. I barely hit 60fps on the standard "Epic" settings with above-recommended hardware, but if I had anything in the background it would fluctuate and dip wildly. I ended up dropping it to "High" and it was relatively solid.
I did appreciate the magnitude of options and tweaks to optimise the performance. There are a ridiculous number of options just for changing the "screen optimisations" of games. DLSS, FSR, NIS and more. If you have an issue with graphics, you can probably tweak it there.
There is an annoying issue where the game stutters on loading some new areas, which goes away quickly, but can be frustrating if you fight instantly on entering a new room. A recent patch improved this for "fewer than 8 CPU cores" but I have at least double that and I’m still feeling it.
Bugs aren’t too frequent, but there is a very annoying one that crops up sometimes after falling down a pit. The screen turns black and then just ... stays there, but still allows both player and enemy movement and attacks. You have to fall down the pit again to get your screen back, wasting more of your health. For a game that is designed to be challenging, this can spell death for your run. Also, the logos at the opening stutter and the audio crackles a lot, but it’s gone once the game actually gets into it.
Returnal is a decent PC port. It is shockingly well optimised for how good it looks, but still suffers from a few bugs that hold it back and will still require some decent kit. Maybe be cautious about getting it if you haven’t upgraded your hardware in a while. Otherwise, feel free to dive into this former PS5 exclusive. Now go, and break the cycle again. — MR
There were some rave reviews for Inscryption last June when it popped up on PC, and then again when it popped up on PlayStations in August, and you'll probably be surprised to know it hasn't magically become a bad game now it has (finally!) made its way to XBox.
Put aside any lingering resentments about how long, you, the poor XBox player, were left waiting for this critical hit, and you'll find a solid conversion of the deck-building card game/escape room puzzler that you've been waiting to get your hands on.
Trapped in a cabin with a malevolent entity, you're forced to play its Magic: The Gathering-style game over and over as a representation of a dangerous journey through a foreboding land, but can also stand up from the card table to rove around the cabin, using clues and solving puzzles to aid you in the game and further your ultimate goal of getting away from this nightmare.
Some of the interface is a bit awkward without a mouse as you navigate the game table, but this only makes for some temporary confusion, and once you've mentally mapped different parts of it to your controller buttons, you're away laughing.
It's pretty much as good as all those PC and PS reviewers said, and if you're a Microsoft main you shouldn't miss out on one of last year's most inventive and unique hits now that you've got the chance to grab it. — BA
