Housemarque‘s PlayStation 5-exclusive is available from today, and the Finnish team has thanked Sony for giving them an opportunity.
Below, you can see a 28-minute gameplay deep dive video, featuring Mikael Haveri (Housemarque’s business development and marketing manager), Gregory Louden (narrative director), and Harry Krueger (game director), showcasing some of the typical runs of the game through Atropos, which changes as the runs go by, with certain progress persisting. Selene gets a melee weapon early in the game, gets to the first real boss, then moves onto the second region of the game (Crimson Wastes).
On Housemarque’s website, their CEO and co-founder Ilari Kuittinen has released a statement, which follows: „We have just wrapped up development and are taking a deep breath here at Housemarque. Even though we announced that Returnal went gold a few weeks back, our team has not stopped working on the game to further balance and polish. This might probably be hard to believe if you aren’t the insider in the game development scene and haven’t been part of shipping a game yourself. There is always something you think you could improve, add, or polish. I think it is not even possible to develop a “perfect” game with everyone in the team thinking that we have now accomplished everything we ever dreamed of when finally setting the game free out to the world. And therefore, we’ve worked on the first-day patch trying to make the game even a little bit better up until the last moment.
When we started our pre-production of the game almost exactly four years ago in March 2017, we never would have imagined how big production we eventually would be making. Looking back, it’s almost incomprehensive to think that we were working on four (!) different projects and we only had 50 people in-house at the time! We were finalizing two different projects, Nex Machina and Matterfall, prototyping and experimenting with a multiplayer project we later named Stormdivers and were starting small pre-production of a new game.
In the age when game publishers are taking less and less creative risks, we are truly thankful to our publishing partner Sony, who has allowed us to work on something very risky and has given fantastic support during the whole project. We are forever grateful for having this opportunity,” Kuittinen wrote.
And we can’t disagree with what he says…
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