This contains spoilers of Returnal (PS5). There is plenty to enjoy about this game beyond the story, but I'm going to spoil it.
I consume a shitload of media. It comes hurtling at all of us, freely, cheaply, and these products are all warring for our attention through memorable presentations, writing, atmosphere, and often a combination of all. It's not clever for me to say that I'm shocked every time a memorable character rises to the surface among the 20 given stories (books, movies, tv shows, games) I interact with weekly. It's not clever because it happens all the time, with that proof being the stories I choose to continue. Maybe with my introversion going full blast to antisocial behavior for the last 2 years is why I find myself paying more attention to fiction than I ever have before.
I've talked before about Returnal as a production, with awesome particle physics and bright shiny lights--a staple of developer Housemarque--with a top-tier soundscape and a genuine showcase for Playstation 5's 3D audio. Before Returnal was Nex Machina, a twin-stick shooter with lasers and steel, Super Stardust HD, a twin-stick space shooter on various planets, and Resogun where the space ship was bound to a cylindrical map. All of these games are incredible fun, look slick, and are very much modern arcade games where you are blowing up things into pretty particles within a few seconds of hitting START.
Returnal is Housemarque's first AAA title and cost about as much at MSRP as the rest of their whole library. Considering that your average modern game is 10-50 hours long with incredibly produced cutscenes, music and graphics, it was weird to hit START and get dropped onto an unknown planet after only 4 seconds of video. Returnal is hard because Atropos is unforgiving, and just about everything is hostile. As you react to this baptism by fire and learn controls, timing and how to deal with shit, you might think to yourself that Housemarque has taken their run-n-gun formula totally 3D in a very successful way, and they did.
Yet, every time you die--which is probably once every few minutes in beginning--you get another few seconds of video. There might be 10 scenes and you'll see them often enough through death and strange contraptions on Atropos, and they involve a crashing space ship, tentacles, Selene screaming, a car accident, and ominous machine-like things with glowing red eyes. The trailer, game cover, and first hour or so will reveal to you that Selene is stuck on a planet that reconfigures itself every time she dies, but she also keeps finding her own corpses. Hold up! This is some dark stuff that I didn't explore the first time around as I was focused on the product stuff of this game.
For the longest time, I figured Selene was like Samus: a fearless space bounty hunter that's really only met her match a handful of times. Samus always prevails after building herself back up, finding upgrades and weapon expansions and modifications until she's the ultimate weapon. Selene in Returnal, however, is dumped into this horrible situation where she dies, can see herself dying, and is revived only to have to do it again. There are either no moral stories of persistence triumphing over evil or I missed it completely. The first time I beat it, I saw the (~30 seconds this time!) movie of Selene escaping Atropos and living a long healthy life to die of old age. At that point, I figured I was done with the story and was looking ahead to working on non-story related completion. I didn't think much about the last 2 seconds where in first-person view, Selene's buried body sunk into the earth.
However, after the studio credits, Selene wakes up again on Atropos. For the game to continue, she has to live another life alone on this scary planet. Fighting cosmic horrors, using alien contraptions, studying her environment to survive, but never to fully escape. This will probably be one of the hardest modern games you've played with a dark, hopeless story of this trapped, wretched person. But it is also an experience so memorable from a developer that hasn't written a story in their games before, and I am thankful I don't have nightmares of Returnal.