Ladies and gentlemen, Walmart Returnal:

- Gameplay is eerily similar with most attack patterns looking straight up lifted from Returnal
- Story that is more interested in spewing cryptic nonsense at you than making sense
- Really stupid ending
- Still pretty fun to play and thats what really matters

Still, there are quite significant teething problems here, since as far as Steam is concerned, this appears to be the first game from this studio (list not exhaustive or in any particular order):
- If you played the modern Doom games and Returnal, this game is almost trivially easy, because health economy is not dialled in correctly at all and the entire game is designed around the player having auto-aim
- The lightness of the dialogue is at times severely at odds with the visual presentation and the story is game is telling
- There are no Iframes on getting hit. which means while the game is overall insanely easy, the Seraphs and the final boss have attacks which will straight up oneshot you from full health if you dodge in the wrong direction, since you will be hit by several dozen balls within a fraction of a second
- I don't think first person really works for a bullet hell game in the style of Returnal, for several bosses my main thought was "Man, I'd really like being able to see my own hitbox right now"
- Some platforming segments feel a bit awkward, because air control after dashing isn't really high enough for how small some of the landing areas are

All in all this is a fun, if flawed short romp and time will tell if the studio can build on this, because there certainly need to be more single player bullet hell shooters. The downsides definitely objectively exist and are numerous, but none of them went beyond minor annoyances and into dealbreakers for me. I don't think this game would have been good/varied enough to sustain a longer playtime, so the seven hours it took me to complete were just the right amount of time.


PS: If you're reading Steam reviews and just as confused as I am, since this game appears to be part of some sort of culture war BS that I'm not terminally online enough to understand, I just want to say this:

If you think "this game is like 80% trans people" then I genuinely urge you to back to middle school because this isn't even a media literacy issue, we are honest to god talking about basic reading comprehension. 99% of characters in this game are humans remotely plugged into various patchwork human/machine abominations against their will and a male voice coming out of a "somewhat female upper body fused to a giant metal sphere with human hands as legs" type of construct does not mean a trans person, something the characters routinely comment on themselves LMAO.

The ending is GoT season 8 levels of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

This game reminds me of Scorn. the environments are great, controls are great. I enjoyed the platfoming, the Story is basic (and full of pronone idology) and just like the Scorn the ending is absolute trash.