Returnal is my personal game of the year 2023 (until now, 30th of April). After it's release in 2021 on PS5 it finally arrived on PC in February 2023.

You're an astronaut and you crashed on an unknown planet. You're stuck in a cycle and everytime you die, the world changes. I won't go any further into the storyline here, you should experience it yourself - but I can tell you, you're stuck in the protagonist's personal hell.

Gameplaywise I'd like to describe it as a child between Control and Binding of Isaac. It's a fast paced third person action game, you'll have to jump and to dash a lot to dodge projectiles - since it's a roguelike and you die fast: Dodge first, then shoot! Fights against enemies and bosses are mostly learning their "projectile-spam-pattern" and evading.
Everytime you die you won't respawn at a bonfire or something, no you start again at your crashed ship with a crappy pistol, without items, keys and artifacts. Rooms, locations and enemies have changed. The only thing you keep are trait unlocks and upgrades for different weapons earned by leveling them up - but you'll have to be lucky enough to find them again.
You also keep vital key items for example like a melee weapon or a grappling hook.

A big negative point for me is that a lot of items and artifacts are useless or have too less of an impact. I hoped that some items and artifacts completely changed a run or the gameplay, but this isn't the case. Mostly they add passive bonuses or unlock some helpful (some less helpful) traits.

Another negative one, but I'm not sure about: The performance was pretty good at release, then some updates released and I've had the feeling it got worse for no reason. But I think the last updates made it better again - beware, this is completely subjective some people said the same in the forums, some not.

Returnal for PC also includes the Ascension DLC, an arena endless mode - perfect if you finished the base game and can't get enough like me.

You can also play the game in two-player coop or you play solo and can find holograms of dead players. If you choose to revenge them, a miniboss will spawn - if you defeat it you earn Ether, a resource you'll keep even after death.


I've bought Returnal for 42€ and didn't regret a cent.

Portal with RTX is a free DLC for all owners of Portal. It's basically a promo for NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 40 Series GPUs (cost per card = a liver or more) and features ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex.

I won't review the gameplay itself because after 15 years, I still think Portal is one of the best puzzle games ever made.

Most of reflections, lightning effects and shadows looked pretty good - you will instantly see a difference between the basic Portal.
Thanks to NVIDIA DLSS you'll also gain a lot of FPS on older RTX-cards.
Important note: If you're using a NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 Series GPU you should press ALT + X and change DLSS from Auto to any other mode. It seems like Auto-mode is DLSS 3 which is enabled by default - you won't gain performance with RTX™ 30 Series GPUs, it's only supported with 40 Series GPUs!

Some textures were flickering and in some sections the lightning was too bright. I'm using a NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3070 with driver version 527.66, which you'll need to even start the game.

I had the feeling Portal with RTX is a little bit unstable at the moment. It crashes everytime I'll try to change the resolution higher than 1920x1080 in the game - If I force it via driver menu it won't even start. It could be because it's the highest resolution supported by my displays but WQHD- or 4k-resolutions also work in other games like Apex Legends or Control.
It also crashed to desktop after the boss fight.

Besides that, I had no problems at all. Portal with RTX ran pretty smooth @ 1920x1080, DLSS Quality-mode with 60 - 100 FPS. But also look for other reviews, it seems like a lot of players got more problems than me.


It's free if you're already owning Portal.