Overview of the Ascension add-on for Returnal

As regular readers know, Returnal is the best game of 2021. The combination of adult and narrative sci-fi with psychological horror, built around incredibly complex combat mechanics and the exploration of an alien planet that changes unpredictably with each of your deaths, is buried deep. into me, into my brain and became one of the few games in my life where it was worth hunting for a platinum trophy. Since then, the patchers have fixed the game’s biggest (and, in my opinion, the only) weakness of the game – the storage system. Now another patch adds two-player co-op. With it came a whole new chapter of the story, in a new location, with new weapons, new story sequences and, of course, a new boss. Is free.

• Platform: PS5
• Publication date: March 22, 2021
• Producer: Housemark (Finland)
• Genre: Simplified roguelike similar to Dark Souls, Bullet Hell
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: co-op pro 2
• Data to download: 17 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Price: free (requires base game)

Sisyphus Tower

When Selena wakes up in an alien jungle near the wreckage of her spaceship, she sees something completely new on the horizon. Where there was nothing before, a biomechanical tower now rises, denying the laws of physics, with a top hidden somewhere above the clouds, which is not even visible from below. Maybe it’s another transmitter like the one in the Forsaken Citadel? Maybe it’s finally a way out of this planet’s cursed loop, where every death just takes you back to the original crash site? Although I have a hundred hours recorded in Returnal, I walked towards the new tower with the same combination of surprise and curiosity that I had when I first arrived on the planet Atropos. This game can convey the experience of the unknown like no other.

The lobby of the tower is deserted and gloomy, indescribable alien machines buzz and pulsate within its walls. In the dead gallery, several holograms depict scenes of death and separation. Brand new alien glyphs on the walls tell a story that you won’t be able to translate until you collect the new parts of the alphabet. And the teleport leads to the first floor. There, the first group of monsters will attack you. After killing them, you will teleport up to the next floor, where you will find either an even more demanding monster room, a space labyrinth, or one of the alien storerooms with weapons, upgrades, or parasites. You never know in advance what awaits you on the next floor, just as the geometry of the rooms is not constant. The third floor may look different one time and different the next.

Indescribable alien machines hum and pulse in the biomechanical walls.

The tower has its own biomes, just like the rest of the planet. Every twenty floors you will encounter her guard, a boss named Algos. The next twenty floors are then noticeably different from the one before it: as one rises higher, the mechanical parts of the tower give way to the living. While your body movements remain constant, gravity and the physical rules of the tower itself are no longer valid. Every second floor is crazier than the last. And if you die, a novelty in the form of an operating room from Earth awaits you in the hallway. If you enter it, you will find yourself in a hospital that you never wanted to see again. Why did alien beings on this planet reproduce it? Why do they care so much about going through your personal hell again and again? An answer and a possible escape may await at the top of the tower. All you have to do is try to get out of there again.

Flow is a state of mind

I’d like to quote Wikipedia here because I probably couldn’t have written better:

“Flow”, in Czech also stream, flow or flow, is a mental state in which a person is immersed in a certain activity in such a way that nothing else seems important to him, the moment when his body or mind rises to the limits of its capabilities in a conscious desire to achieve something difficult that is worth it. As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called and defined it, it is included in positive psychology and is talked about in connection with many areas of human life.”

Climbing Sisyphus Tower is built with the same care, storytelling and atmosphere as the game’s original story campaign, including episodes from your own eyes, including movies, including multiple (!) endings with closing credits after each one. . On that side, it’s a full fourth act of the story that also fits in perfectly between the original three (so you can play the tower before you finish the main game). But what is the biggest success of this new location is the sheer dynamics, escalation and sprinting through the floors, where you are constantly rewarded with extra resources to progress faster, so your conquest tower turns into an adrenaline rush forward as you gradually saw your movements and fighting abilities, and you became an unstoppable flying predator, destroying everything around without a single stop. Only a game with such perfectly polished controls and combat system can achieve such a smooth and exciting flow. The last time this happened to me was probably in 2016 with Doom, when he had not yet been spoiled with extra jumping nipples (like Eternal). Of course, the location of each arena plays a decisive role.

In addition to the tower itself, Ascension also brought the aforementioned two-player co-op, while you can purposefully play with a friend or invite a random online player. Since you can revive each other after death, of course, this makes the game much easier – however, you still have to take into account some shared resources (like first aid kits), and if you move too far apart, the connected player will be teleported. guest player. If you have feared this game in the past due to its roguelite nature or difficulty, being able to play with a teammate should help you overcome those fears. However, co-op is not available in Sisyphus Tower (even in first-person or daily challenges).