Returnal's new survival mode is a worthy, weighty addition to 2021's best game
Much like Returnal itself, Ascension is far smarter, darker, and more fun than first impressions might lead you to believe
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Credit where it’s due: Nothing communicates “This part of our video game is meant to be an infinite, incompletable challenge” quite like calling said level “The Tower Of Sisyphus.” Housemarque, creators of last year’s A.V. Club Game Of The Year Returnal, weren’t mincing words when they released the game’s excellent new survival mode a couple of weeks ago: No matter what you do, boulder gonna go up, and then boulder gonna roll right back down.
I was hesitant, at first, to dive into Ascension, the free DLC that added the Tower Of Sisyphus to Returnal, presenting protagonist Selene with a whole new venue for her endlessly repeating deaths. After all, when I sang Returnal’s praises too many damn times last year, it was as much for its emotionally devastating and elliptical storytelling as its addictive extraterrestrial running and gunning. Would a new score-based survival mode, sending Selene climbing a procedurally generated tower full of random assortments of space beasties, be able to scratch that same itch?
Which just goes to show that even a Returnal superfan can fail to give this game sufficient credit from time to time. As it turns out, Ascension (which also adds in a co-op mode that I’ve unfortunately yet to indulge in) serves as neither a sequel to Selene’s adventures on the ridiculously hostile alien planet of Atropos, or an afterthought; instead, the Tower Of Sisyphus is a parallel journey that, in best Returnal fashion, both feeds into, and reinforces, the cyclical nature of the existence Selene finds herself trapped within.
That extends to one of the most affecting grace notes in Returnal’s storytelling arsenal: the first-person non-combat sequences the original game used to break up its usual third-person action gameplay, and to leave even a powerhouse like Selene feeling profoundly vulnerable. In the base game, these walking simulator sequences took the form of trips through her house on Earth, inexplicably appearing amidst a lush alien jungle. In Ascension, she’s instead teleported to a surgical theater (or maybe morgue?) that opens onto an apparently normal hospital corridor, with a door that refuses to open unless the proper sacrifices are made. Who’s inside? One of the beautiful things about Returnal’s writing is that it tends to offer up multiple answers to questions like that—not because of rote ambiguity or aimlessness, but because of its fixation on the way the miseries of one generation are inevitably repeated for the next.
Returnal’s story is, as ever, a little tricky to write about, both because it defies those easy answers, and because it hides so many of its deeper obsessions behind the more straightforward “Stranded astronaut gets stuck in Groundhog Day loop filled with murderous xenofauna and over-abundant particle effects” story. But it’s not hard to see the metaphorical weight of a tower that a person throws themselves at over and over again, convinced that this time they’ll break through to whatever happiness hides at the top. Surely, if you give enough of yourself to the thing that’s hurting you, it’ll change, right?
The only figurative breakdown, here as in the base game, is how goddamn fun that climb can be—something you normally don’t associate with murderous metaphors for generational trauma. Admittedly, Ascension doesn’t necessarily fix the undeniable (and time-consuming) flaws in Returnal’s structure, with runs up the Tower often taking more than an hour at a time. (None of that much-demanded save file suspending here, either.)
But as a new way to pit the game’s satisfying roster of guns against its menagerie of beautiful monsters, it’s close to sublime. Challenges are varied, the new and evolving boss monster is capable of putting some truly gnarly bullet hell patterns on the screen, and the new Disgorger set of temporary super weapons adds variety to Selene’s armory without taking focus away from the base guns. And since the only thing pushing you to play longer than you already are is your own desire to see how much higher the Tower can go, there’s significantly less sense of your time being wasted when a long run suddenly ends in a hail of neon bullets.
All of which is to say that I was expecting Ascension to be fun, because playing Returnal is generally pretty fun (albeit sometimes in an “I wish this alien man would stop trying to chop my head off while missile drones rip through my shield at will” sort of way). What I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, was more of my favorite game of 2021. What a happy (miserable, futile) surprise!