In a lot of horror games, developers instill fear in the hearts of players by making them feel helpless. There’s lots of horror games where players have no recourse against the game’s monsters. All they can do it stay quiet, hide, and pray that the monsters don’t notice them. Returnal may have horror elements, but it’s not one of those games. It’s a sci-fi shooter that promises lots of combat, and intense combat at that. Players will gain all kinds of new weapons that Selene can use to try to survive on the surface of Atropos, as Returnal intends to scare and unsettle its players thanks in large part to atmosphere and set design.
At least, that’s what fans thought when the game was first revealed. It now looks like there might be some more helpless moments scattered throughout the game than anticipated. In the latest State of Play, Housemarque released a trailer revealing a new element of gameplay. While exploring Atropos, Selene finds what appears to be a wooden cabin in the woods. It’s completely out of place in the eldritch landscape of Atropos, but Selene decides to explore it anyway. This unsettling moment is awfully reminiscent of a certain teaser for a Silent Hill game: PT, Hideo Kojima’s infamous demo, which presented a rich and horrifying story in nothing more than a hallway.
When Selene finds this cabin in the woods, she implies that she recognizes it, and that it’s someplace she knows from Earth. While her exact relationship with the building is unknown, she seems to dread it. Returnal is played from a third person perspective, but when Selene steps into the cabin, the game switches to a first person perspective, offering fans a glance at the foyer just before the trailer ends. Although it’s possible that this was just part of a cutscene, the trailer suggests that there will be first person exploration segments in Returnal. Much like PT, it sounds like Selene will have to leave combat behind and explore this cabin alone to solve a mystery.
Returnal‘s cabin channels a lot of the same energy as PT‘s mysterious hallway. The player isn’t sure why they’re here, but the game definitely delivers a message that they’re not supposed to be here, and something is terribly wrong. It’s hard to say how much of the cabin Selene can explore, but exploring it will probably compare to PT in a few ways. There might be pictures, notes, and so on from Selene’s past that she has to read and collect to piece together her own muddled memories. It seems likely that these tense first person Returnal segments will set up story beats as Selene investigates Atropos, much like how PT was supposed to set up for Norman Reedus’ character in the ill-fated Silent Hills.
Juxtaposition is always a good way to make people feel unsettled in horror. In PT, the developers made the player feel increasingly anxious as they saw a normal home disturbed by threatening messages and gruesome apparitions. Lots of other games unsettle players in similar ways, like how Control‘s Oceanview Motel puts players in an ordinary location but fills them with dread anyhow. Returnal‘s cabin isn’t intimidating in a vacuum, but the circumstances Selene finds it in are cause for concern.
PT is always bittersweet to look back on. Silent Hill fans everywhere were really looking forward to seeing how Kojima would spool this demo out into a full game, but it seems now that his version Silent Hills will never come together. However, the demo’s atmosphere has been a crucial inspiration to horror developers everywhere. The sneak pack at the cabin in Returnal seems like a pretty clear nod to PT. Even though Silent Hills may be a thing of the past, it’s nice to see how it lives on in games like Returnal.
Returnal releases for PS5 on April 30, 2021.
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