What made you decide to design your first AAA game as a psychological horror title? Louden:
With Returnal, our goal has been to tell a mysterious, layered, and haunting story. Not haunting like jump scares, but haunting like something that stays with you. For us, we like stories that leave you with lots of questions and messages, and Returnal delivers on that.
We also wanted to create a story that survives repletion like our gameplay does, so our dense and layered story is built to stay interesting and mysterious but also be revealed as you replay and fight forward per cycle. This is why Returnal had to be a psychological thriller.
Are there particular elements in that genre that you felt matched well with the game mechanics you wanted to explore?
Louden: Our biggest reference for Returnal has been our own Housemarque games, and we wanted to evolve them within a new perspective. We wanted to bring all of our experience to this new perspective and share our view of what third-person shooters can be. Our bullet hell, arcade spirited, and tight controls work extremely well and plays like our other titles but with a new style and taste for players. On top of this, we have a dense narrative for players to dig through and uncover as well when they’re in flow.
Returnal aims to mix the procedurally-generated approach of a rogue-lite with the often necessary driving force of the deep narratives found in horror. How have you managed to achieve this?
Louden: All of Returnal is handcrafted, but the most exciting thing about the game is every time you play, we procedurally connect these moments, connecting our handcrafted environments, level design, combat, and narrative beats. It still surprises me with how wild the variation can be as Selene fights across Atropos and the surprises we have set up.
Narratively, the psychological aspects and the dark sci-fi time loop paradigm are achieved through our philosophy of adding lots of hidden layers narratively that are uncovered through repetition. Our gameplay is made for repetition, discovery, and then mastery. Our story follows the same goals. The cyclical nature of the narrative design means the more you push forward, the more you discover Selene, her past, and her reason for coming to Atropos.
After fighting through many cycles with Selene, sacrificing her humanity through fusing with alien technology, these new layers of her character and story are revealed through audio logs, cinematics, voice-over, our production design, and sound design. Returnal is a game that rewards players that piece together the story. It is challenging but rewarding in that way. I also feel it is a story that can only be told in games as it is defined by the cycle and is delivered non-linearly. Returnal is told by you re-examining earlier logs, questioning earlier moments, and deciphering all of the questions we have set up.
To me, great stories are loops and are about characters changing from these loops. Returnal, I feel, is a story about uncovering ownership and breaking the cycle we put ourselves in.
In terms of the story behind Returnal, I read that Selene — the game’s protagonist — is a Greek-American deep-space scout who finds herself marooned on a planet called Atropos. In Greek mythology, Atropos is one of the three sisters of fate and destiny. Specifically, she’s the Fate who cuts the thread of each mortal, defining their moment and method of death. How tied is that to the game’s overarching themes and mechanics of death?
Louden: All of this is intentional and is part of this layered approach of storytelling. I urge players to question and research our words, question what they read, see, and hear in Returnal. We want this all to create a mysterious, layered, and haunting story that will stay with players and be something for them to piece together.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog