Game developer Housemarque has recently released a new story trailer for upcoming dark, sci-fi action thriller Returnal revealing more details on how the game mechanics work and the premise of the story.
According to the story trailer, all of the trouble started when the Greek-American ASTRA deep space scout Selene goes against orders in order to travel to the alien planet called Atropos. She intends to follow the trail of the White Shadow broadcast signal.
When Selene arrives nearby the planet, she suddenly crash lands in an alien forest. She discovers a lot of alien things like scary ruins of an alien civilization filled with alien corpses, statues, gates, and xeno-tech. For some reason, she felt that she was not alone on the planet. Dangerous creatures then attack her on sight.
After getting attacked, Selene dies from her wounds, but finds herself resurrected again in her ship’s cockpit before the crash. When she comes out from the ship again, she finds out that the world’s environment has changed, the layouts are not the same, and the cycle of rebirth is discovered.
During her journey through Atropos, players will then discover more information about the alien civilization when it thrived via holographic statues. Selene calls them the Xeno-archives. They can also find the disturbed writings found on Xenoglyphs, which tell the same story but on a different point of view. The Xeno-archives are purely visual that need to be deciphered while the Xenoglyphs are written and need to be translated via the language samples that players collect in their journey across the planet.
There is also a different point of view when players go into a mystery that Selene finds in her journeys. Instead of the usual third-person view perspective, it turns into a first-person view, making it more intensifying than usual.
Returnal launches on April 30 exclusively on PlayStation 5.
Here’s the new story trailer: