No, really, Returnal is about joy

This essay will spoil the everliving shit out of Returnal, Housemarque's 2021 third-person psych horror roguelite shooter. I strongly recommend you play it first, if you can - it is tough as nails and does not respect your time. Putting the puzzle pieces together yourself is more satisfying than seeing someone else do it for you, especially with a work this dense. The content warnings below are themselves major spoilers. This is your last stop.

Thanks to the good folks in the Critical Distance community and to Rob Haines for suggestions that made this long-cooking piece much better.

Alright. You have been warned. This piece will discuss: abuse, trauma, motherhood (derogatory), abortion, delusions and unreality, body horror, and poor handling of heavy themes about acquired disability, abuse, caretaker murder, child abuse, death and possible murder of a child. The fact that those content warnings are spoilers are in my opinion a major part of why the themes are handled poorly. Graphic detail will be left out except for neutral descriptions of body horror game mechanics.

Before all else, I must say that I adore Returnal. It is a masterwork of a game: the graphics tech on display is top-notch, the art direction magnificent, the writing exquisite even in its failures, the soundtrack a gem, the game feel maybe the best I have ever experienced. I suspect that the inability to pause a run at launch made it difficult to impossible for critics to truly dive in and become obsessed, resulting in a surprisingly low amount of pieces about the game. And yet it is maybe one of the most dense, unsubtle, themes-rich big-budget games in recent years.

You may want to take a look at two of those few pieces before reading further, as I will build on them. The first is Jacob Geller's video essay, "Returnal is a Hell of Our Own Creation". Jacob produces a beautiful demonstration of the harmony between Returnal's game structure and its story, though sadly he has to stop short of diving into the underlying themes and their politics. The second is Alma Roda-Gil's piece in Unwinnable Monthly 159, "Time Loop of Trauma" (please give Unwinnable your money to read the whole thing if you can). Alma dives into one of said underlying themes, specifically cycles of abuse and the way trauma stays with you forever. Both of them, however, stop at (correctly!) assessing that Returnal is about Selene being stuck in Hell.

To this I add: yes, and she loves it there.

Don't take my word for it. That's all in the text, after all: you keep finding audio logs from Future Selene, and they are ever-escalating.

"I'm hesitant to return to my life..."
(AST-AL-028 "Knowledge Threshold")

"How can I possibly return to my life after everything here..."
(AST-AL-030 "Higher Purpose")

"This world is my home in an uncaring universe. I do not wish to leave."
(AST-AL-046 "Blessed Silence")

"This is my place in the stars. I will stay here now. As you will."
(AST-AL-066 "The Truth Lying")

You'll tell me, this is a horror story. She's gone insane, that's all, and those logs are classic foreshadowing. It's by the book: start with a low context protagonist, make them go through hell, eventually reveal that they have committed monstrous acts, and therefore deserve to face infinite torture that makes them fall apart as a person. There is support for the insanity thesis in the text, notably via the ship logs - but that conversation then easily becomes about which parts of this story are or aren't real. Returnal, however, is very keen on teaching you that reading any of its text as literal facts is a dangerous game. (On this topic, see also Folding Ideas' "Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor")

It's a clever bait and switch. Humans like to assemble disparate pieces into a consistent narrative, into a story. With videogames in particular, the lore puzzle mode of narration made popular by Dark Souls and its cousins has trained an entire generation of players to read stories this way. And so, as you go through the first act of Returnal, it's all fairly familiar cryptic storytelling: monoliths to decode, mysterious fauna analysis, scout logs from the future and ponderings about alien civilizations, a farmhouse that belongs on Earth yet is here on this alien planet. It initially encourages you to approach it that way. There is so much to learn! Game mechanics, attack timings, piles and piles of fog-clouded lore. A seemingly rational explanation for the White Shadow signal that starts it all.

As Jacob Geller describes in the later part of his essay, though, that literal read becomes utterly unsustainable in the second act. Translations become less reliable as you push them further. The farmhouse returns, again and again, impossibly familiar. Holograms from ancient aliens somehow show Selene, beheaded. A car lies broken at the bottom of the abyss.

Go through the whole game once more, use the same lens on the first act, and it becomes crystal clear: this story is not about putting all the fragments into the right order. There is too much that doesn't add up, can't ever add up. Instead, what happens if we look at the themes at work here? At the vibes? Oh, yes, they are rancid, but they are also gleeful.

Selene initially expresses distress at hearing her later self. Audio logs are typically from the past because time only goes one way, for starters, while the ones she finds have yet to be recorded. But her worry is more specific than that - as she puts it, "I don't want to become that woman who speaks madness with my voice." (AST-AL-035 "New Cycle").

As you go deeper, those mad words will inevitably move from a recording to her mouth. She becomes that woman, speaking of ascension, of belonging. The guesses she formulated aloud to guide the player in interpreting a ruined alien civilization become her own obsessions - or, one could argue, were about her all along. She speaks of becoming something other. Something more.

You, too, have become something other. Something more. As Jacob puts it: "you will eventually, ironically, master this world". You have become faster, more precise, quick to select upgrades and weigh risk against reward, dashing away from an attack before the sound truly registers in your ears. Sure, you're stuck in hell, but hell feels so fucking good to go through again and again. Why should Selene not feel the same as she changes?

This, of course, brings us to the body horror so core to the gameplay. It comes in early: one of the very first upgrades you find is the ability to use teleporters, acquired by grafting alien technology onto Selene's spine. The xeno-tech, she says, merges "disturbingly well" with her suit, making her "irreversibly contaminated" (ALT-AL-020 "Xeno-Type Tech"). By the time she reaches the deepest of the deep, she has grafted black-and-glowing-red attachments onto her wrists, her shins, her eyes. As befits the protagonist of a roguelite with persistent upgrades, she gains more and more power by doing so. As befits the protagonist in a Giger-inspired world, she transforms her body in the process.

At no point does Selene express regret. Early on, she is resigned to do what is necessary to survive. Later on, there is clear pleasure in modifying herself further, past practicity and into something else entirely. That fascination applies to parasites from the get-go: she is "compelled" to attach them to her body (AST-AL-009 "Parasite Attachment"). Those tangled knots of procedural tentacles act both as a key risk-reward game mechanic and an extra bit of thematic grossness. If you played this on PC: know that the wet wriggling noises come out of your controller speaker on PS5.

That too could be pinned on insanity. Can you feel that interpretation getting weaker just as Selene gets stronger, however? How about we look at what she left behind, and how she feels about that?

Let's rewind for a minute, and talk about what Returnal has to say about motherhood. Alma Roda-Gil's piece approaches that theme via the angle of parental abuse, but does not go into the details of how it is both omnipresent and violently unsubtle in the game. How about we look at a few examples?

Your healing and health upgrade item is called silphium. The item descriptions make it clear it mends and reinforces you by merging with your suit, whether as "web-like strands" (Silphium) or "crystalline structures" (Resin). Silphium is the name of a plant believed to have served as a contraceptive and abortifacent in Ancient Greece.

Databank entries for hostiles will mention them eating their young (Kerberon) or being reduced to their reproductive function (Strixera Matriarch), when they don't just go for full on Bad Vibes ("motherless stillborn [CORRUPTED TEXT] uniformity a core of repulsion lodged in substrate never to sprout" for the Aetheract). Some of those entries are fairly obviously about Theia, Selene's abusive mother, and the loss of her lower body mobility. The Broken Automaton has "become bisected, losing its lower limbs and becoming dangerously unstable". The Abyssal Trichozoid description contains the following: "Seemingly has lost use of [PARSING ERROR] bound to its seat. Limited only to its identity as a mother, but with no care for its spawn."

In the Tower's story scenes, the hospital corridor ends in two doors. One leads to the Maternity Ward. The other to Palliative Care. If you enter through one, you exit through the other. Those scenes also have a magazine called "MOTHERS", with articles such as "Daily life - How to keep your career and family from falling apart", "Single mothers - How do they do it?", "Hopes & Dreams - Why you don't need them".

Returnal says it again and again - in Selene's eyes, motherhood will destroy you and giving birth will ruin your life. Like everything else in this game, the theme is prismatic and approached in several ways. There is regret, there is anger, there is anguish over career dreams made impossible by motherhood, there is terror at becoming the same abusive monster that her own mother was, there is yearning for freedom.

Most of all, though, there is perverse joy at having finally shed the role of mother and made the dream attainable once more. All it took was a oh-so-tragic car accident, a burden left behind, a child sinking into the abyss. Ship log #23 states it as plainly as possible - its Act 1 version is "The howl of loss became a howl of rage, for she understood then that she had become nothing more than mother". In Act 2, it becomes "The cry of release became a cry of delight, for she understood then that she could become something more than mother".

While the game does not give true hints, it makes me wonder whether Selene killed Helios on purpose or by accident. Who can tell? How much negligence does it take to create intent? What is certain is that her feelings about it are not limited to grief. Theia was disabled by a similar car accident, her dream of space exploration shattered along with her spine, and she turned to cruelty against her own child. Selene was instead disabled by motherhood - that, at least, was solvable with a little bit of child maybe-murder.

This is obviously a deeply problematic parallel to draw. The way Returnal treats disability leaves no room for nuance, let alone the thinnest strand of liberatory politics. It gets worse, too, because a document in the hospital story scene strongly suggests Selene set her childhood's farmhouse on fire and left Theia to die there... or at least dreamt of doing so. Those are heavy themes, dark themes, all too relevant to the lives of many disabled people and struggling parents. They deserve better than being a spooky reveal that you can't issue spoiler-free content warnings about.

That aside - the conclusion is the same. Freedom. Pleasure. Joy. All of it twisted, monstrous, but no less real. You see it now, right?

Helios was abandoned. Selene went to space. Jacob's essay goes in-depth into how this became an inespacable pit of guilt. Alma's essay goes in-depth into the cycle of trauma and abuse. But neither of them has time to tackle Selene's own obsession born from those twin nightmares: ascension.

There is religious language throughout the entire game. Early on, it is easily dismissed as Selene being a Greek mythology nerd - to the point of having a stack of books next to the bed in her ship. It then makes sense for her to use that framework to analyze an alien civilization: for example, she interprets the cloth wrapped around statues as an attempt to "transform into something greater and ascend" (AST-AL-022 Wrapped Statues) and speaks of a "Throne of Exaltation" (AST-AL-042 "Severed Unbound"). As discussed, this happens while the story is still misleading us into interpreting it literally.

As the game progresses and it becomes less and less clear whether said civilization ever existed at all, this language persists but switches subjects. It is instead used about the protagonist herself - first in logs from later-Selene that leave earlier-Selene distraught, and all too soon by the Selene whose linear time through the collapsed loops we share. AST-AL-017 ("Ascent from Bondage") is a prime early example:

I know why they became Severed.
Divine punishment for failing ascension.
Ascension!
No sooner has the word escaped my lips than a vast image of the Transcendent Watcher in the Deep Below consumes my mind.
I have begun having visions of where I have yet to go.
They lead me continually downwards from Olympus and into myself.
I alone am worthy.

Selene reacts with "What happened to... her? That was not me." Missing from that sentence is, of course, a "yet".

"Ascend, descend, ascend" (AS-AL-096 "Offering") sums it up. The main game is described in detail by Jacob in his video: climb the mountain with a light at the top, rise even further through the Citadel's spire, then descend ever deeper to the bottom of the sea. Finally, ascend once more through the infinite Tower of Sisyphus that was added post-launch, watch it break apart as it reaches to impossible heights that it - and you - can never reach. There is plenty of religious evocation in this momentum alone, the imagery of the mountain in particular is very loaded. Worry not, there is nonetheless text to make this even more blatant.

With progress comes more and more mystical vocabulary. "A hymn of liberation from want" (AST-AL-027 "Endless Song"), "Once I climbed the mountaintop, hoping to ascend. Soon I will sink in dark waters, transcending as all light is smothered" (AST-AL-049 "Before Severing"), "After everything, am I still unworthy?" (AST-AL-054 "Lurking Watcher"), the delightful double-meaning of "I will ascend!" in the Tower (AS-AL-073 "Challenge Simulation"). If Selene has gone insane, it is in a distinctly spiritual way, deeply concerned with how she will be judged, and so insanity alone does not give satisfying answers to what is going on here.

The character arc is strengthened by the mirrored structure of the game itself, most directly between logs AST-AL-015 ("The Summit") and AST-AL-048 ("The Abyss"). The first one is found in the Crimson Wastes, as you ascend through security lasers towards Ixion. The second is found in the Fractured Wastes as you want nothing more than to descend towards the abyss. "There are certain... obstacles I don't look forward to re-experiencing" becomes "There are certain... sacrifices I do look forward to re-experiencing". And an answer to a call - "But I feel as though something at the top is summoning me" - becomes the terror of being refused by what you seek - "But I feel as though something at the bottom is rejecting me".

There is no regret left here. Selene is reaching for transcendance, for a form of religious ecstasy that leaves everything behind, even though she never quite gets there as that would require the game to truly end. Yet in that tension that doesn't resolve there is clear pleasure mixed with the agony. She knows that what is at the end of the journey is worth every second of martyrdom.

Once more: you, too, will master this world. And so I had felt this shift, this eagerness in Selene and in me, this perverse joy at ascending and descending and transcending, from the first time I defeated Hyperion and blasted through the rest of Act 2 in one sitting to the slow grind of finding every log and maxing out every weapon attribute. I could sense something in those themes, in those vibes - but without finding the words to pin down why such a horrific and punishing game had something so disturbingly positive about it.

The key finally came courtesy of Sunny Moraine on Bluesky sharing an excellent essay by Simon Strantzas on transcendence in horror:

Both horror and happiness are subjective concepts. They mean different things to different people, and we can tell stories that are horrific from the reader’s perspective while being the opposite from the character’s.

[...]

Fiction about transcendence through horror is necessarily fiction about change and metamorphosis. About one’s true self being revealed. About how we can be made not only better but be made new by our most troubling, painful experiences.

This was what I was missing. The story of Returnal is objectively horrific. But Selene - her tale is one of liberation through the death of a child, of casting away motherhood and embracing monstrosity, of making her body Other and stronger by merging it with alien technology. It is a tale of change, of revelation, of major content warnings that are also spoilers.

Selene's true self happens to not exactly be a good person. She never claims to be blameless. Nonetheless, one must imagine her happy. Why else would she keep pushing that boulder up?