Award-winning third-person shooter ‘Returnal’ finally comes to the PC in early 2023. The announcement came at Game Awards 2022 after many rumors and leaks sparked across the web in the days leading up to the event. The PC release was teased as “coming soon” in the teaser, though no exact date for 2023 was mentioned. It won several end-year accolades, including Best Game at the 18th British Academy Games Awards.
The game’s roguelike gameplay, for those who are new to the game, Selene Vassos, a pilot who has been left stranded on the alien planet Atropos, is the player’s character in Returnal. Vassos is stuck in a time loop. This explains the player’s ability to respawn after dying since the game’s early 2021 release, Housemarque, the game’s developer, has consistently made improvements to the game.
Returnal’s Ascension update, for instance, included a survival mode where players could team up to take on the Tower of Sisyphys. The lack of a save feature and extra stuff to do added another dimension to the emotional experience.
Exciting PC Gamers
An RTX 2070 Super or RX 6700 XT graphics card is recommended on the game’s Steam page, which appeared shortly after the PC version was announced. That’s pretty high, but we’ve seen GPU recommendations for games that demand more, like the RTX 3070 for A Plague Tale Requiem. Returnal, on the other hand, suggests that players have 32GB of RAM.
The good news is that those recommended specs—which also include an Intel i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X—are probably necessary to enable ray tracing at 4K and crank up the settings to their maximum.
Since Returnal has received a lot of praise since its initial release, including BAFTA for best video game, it would make sense for Sony to release a PC version to take advantage of the game’s reputation.
