Returnaloffers players a gripping, sci-fi mystery full of cosmic horror elements and exciting action gameplay, but it has also quickly cemented itself as an incredibly hard game. Many players are finding themselves struggling to get past the first biome, and as such they are using everything they have available in order to make it a little further. For the most part, developerHousemarque encourages this kind of behavior, but the most recent patch seems to indicate otherwise. Players that were used to using the bed on Helios to sleep and recover health are going to need to adapt as this feature has been drastically nerfed.
Like many roguelike games,Returnalplaces a big emphasis on avoiding damage. As a reward to players that don’t get hit, healing items instead increase maximum health. This has a snowball effect in that players that are already doing well will start doing better. Less skilled players rarely get to make use of this feature, but healing in the bed at Helios allowed them to get a headstart in the first biome that would help a lot in later encounters as they progressed further on in the story.
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Returnal - Helios Before the Patch
Before the most recent update, players could return to Helios (the ship) whenever they wanted during thefirst and fourth biomes. Depending on how close the nearest fast travel point was, it might take a few minutes to get there, but it was often worth doing. Players could enter the ship and sleep on the bed, restoring a portion of their health. If this didn’t take them to full, they could simply exit Helios, reenter the ship, and then sleep again. With this method, it was possible for players to heal to full after every encounter in the first biome if they didn’t mind spending the time running back.
The real benefit of this method is that it would turn all healing items (Silphium) into items that increase max health instead (Silphium Resin). This meant thatplayers could boost their maximum integrityquite a bit before challenging the first boss, allowing them to get farther in the game a little easier. While all this might sound great, the feature wasn’t universally loved. Its mere existence sparked some debate about the nature of difficulty in gaming, but now the most recent patch has ignited that spark even more.
Returnal - Helios After the Patch
After the most recent patch, thebed in Helios was nerfedin two very major ways. For one, it heals less health now than it used to, meaning players can’t rely on it to get them back to full integrity even if they only took a little bit of damage. On its own this would mostly be a mild inconvenience, but the next nerf is hitting casual players hard. Rather than being able to use the bed as many times as the player needed, Selene can now only sleep one time per cycle.
This renders the bed mostly useless, aside from giving players a slight health boost either right before or right after taking down the boss. Players will not likely find much of a reason to return to the ship anymore, but whether or not that’s a bad thing is up for debate. There are still plenty ofother ways to heal inReturnal, but now players won’t be able to completely optimize their biome 1 or biome 4 runs anymore. Both sides have valid arguments, so it’s impossible to say objectively which is correct, but it’s certainly interesting to look at for what it says about video game difficulty as a whole.
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Returnal - Players Should Heal At Helios
For those players in support of using Helios to heal in order to get more Resin pickups in the first and fourth biomes, the supporting arguments are obvious.Returnalis already a notoriously difficult game even with this feature implemented, and there are plenty of players who have not been able to make it past the first biome anddefeat Phrike, the first boss. For Housemarque to take a feature that was helping newer players get a little further and nerf it into the ground, it’s easy to see why players might find that a little harsh. What’s more, players that don’t want to use this feature don’t have to.
Before this patch, there were even players calling forhealing at Heliosto be buffed. Some thought there should always be a fast travel point right next to the ship to make returning to heal easier, and others felt that sleeping in the bed one time should heal players to full. Instead of any of those changes, the ship now heals less and can only be used once. Many would have likely been alright with a patch that did one or the other, but both is a bit excessive in the eyes of manyReturnalplayers.
Returnal - Players Shouldn’t Heal At Helios
On the other side of the argument are those players that think using Helios to heal should never have been a valid strategy in the first place. On the surface, the argument here is thatReturnalis meant to be hard, and using Helios to heal is effectively handicapping the player’s growth. When they do finally manage to beat the first biome, they won’t have the option to rest at Helios anymore anyway, so instead players should spend time practicing and getting better at the game.
Another interesting argument has to do with thepsychology of video games. Given the chance, players will often choose to optimize things as much as they can, but this can often lead to players actually having less fun. When applied to the Helios controversy, it’s easy to see how players constantly running back to Helios and spending time healing so they can pick up every resin on the map does this, as it breaks both the immersion and the flow of the game. Both opinions are equally valid, but it seems that this time Housemarque has sided with those that are against using Helios to heal.
