#12894091, By Farley2k Returnal - Housemarque PS5 exclusive

Farley2k 29 Apr 2021 15:54:04 261 posts
Seen 2 weeks ago
Registered 4 years ago

From the Kotaku review

Here is a bit more about the save thing. Not to beat it even more but I can't imagine telling my son he can't play on the PS5 today because I need to leave my game running even though I am at work.

That’s not to say Returnal isn’t devoid of archaic bullshit, nor to absolve Returnal of said bullshit. Exhibit A: There is no official way to save and quit out of the game. A run in Returnal can last hours, especially if you’re combing through every room in every biome for as many resources as you can scrounge up. That you can’t save your game and pivot to something else smacks of a design decision from a prior, less accommodating era of gaming. If, for whatever reason, your PS5 turns off, you’re screwed, out potentially hours of carefully earned progress.

I can’t even begin to see the logic behind this strange decision. In a reviewer’s guide provided to Kotaku, Sony, Returnal’s publisher, suggested using the PS5’s “rest mode” as a workaround. You can pause the game at any point, and putting the console into “rest” will suspend your game. In my experience, this trick hasn’t failed. But I’m an edge case, having devoted nearly every hour of my free time over the past nine days toward playing this game. Most players likely won’t be in that position. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of people who share a PS5, or people who work erratic schedules, or people who can otherwise only play video games in sporadic bursts. At the end of the day, designing the game without a save function at all sure feels like a callous choice meant to wring attention from players who might not always have that attention to spare.