Returnal’s developers want to focus on creating bigger experiences in the future.

This might be somewhat of a self-critical comment: Resogun was one of the PlayStation 4 launch titles in November 2013, and that side-scrolling bullet hell shoot’em up provided a significant challenge for the then-new Sony console that has become one of the best-sellers for the company (only the PS2 pulled in more sales, but unless Sony cuts the PlayStation 4’s price and continues manufacturing it, the PS4 will remain the second-best).

„We’ve been working on two projects previously, and now with Returnal we have of course only one project. It’s hard to say if we will continue with one or two projects in the future, but the idea of us now being able to establish ourselves with Returnal will be defining the future type of titles we want to make. The idea is that we now want to show we’re not just a Resogun studio.

We can do all kinds of things, and from our studio’s perspective, that means that we want to go for these bigger types of experiences. Now, we still love arcade. We still love smaller games as well. Who knows? Maybe 26 years in the future we’ll do more of that as well. But that depends on how successful we can build ourselves with the types of experiences that Returnal now is representing,” Mikael Haveri, the marketing director of Housemarque, told GameReactor in an interview.

The 26 years comment isn’t random: Housemarque was formed in July 1995 as a merger between Bloodhouse and Terramarque (both formed in 1993, being the first commercial devs in Finland), and that happened nearly 26 years ago. Returnal is a success for the team: its Metacritic page shows an 86/100 average out of 106 publications, which is a solid score. (In comparison, Resogun has 84/100 out of 66 critic reviews.)

Returnal’s player average out of 2646 ratings is 7.3/10. Perhaps due to the save system, which we discussed before.

Source: PSL