Returnal Explained

On the surface, PS5 exclusive Returnal seems to be the story of an astronaut stranded on a hostile, alien world after detecting a mysterious signal. Worse still, she is trapped in a strange time loop of sorts: every time she dies, she wakes up back at the crash site—though her bodies from past and future failures to escape the planet still litter the landscape. But as you go through the game, you get a myriad of bits and pieces that hint that there is much more going on than meets the eye. Of course, it can be tough putting all those pieces together—even after seeing not only the normal ending but the secret one as well. So, taking into account all the cutscenes, character dialogue, voice recordings, and alien tablets, here is my interpretation of what Returnal is all about.

*Note: from here on, this article is nothing but spoilers.

Image source: Housemarque on Twitter

At its heart, Returnal is the story of one family and the cycle of domestic abuse that continues through the generations. So, let’s go through it chronologically.

In the 1970s, Selene’s mother, Theia, was in the running to become an Apollo-era astronaut. However, one night, when driving with a young Selene, the car mysteriously crashed off a bridge and into a lake. Selene was miraculously unharmed but Theia had spinal damage which left her confined to a wheelchair. With this, Theia’s entire world crumbled. All she had worked for was for nothing. She would never be able to go to space.

To cope with her loss, Theia began to live vicariously through her daughter—forcing her dreams of becoming an astronaut onto Selene. Yet, even then, she ingrained in the child’s mind that it should have been her to go to space, not Selene.

Even as an adult, Selene still struggled to live up to Theia’s expectations and become an astronaut. However, one night, Selene had enough and irately confronted her mother. Her mother responded by forcing herself out of her wheelchair and tried to strangle Selene. Selene pushed Theia off of her and to the ground—fatally injuring the old woman in the process. Even as Theia reached out, imploring for her daughter to help her, Selene turned away and left her to die.

Years later, Selene found herself as a single mother to her son, Helios. Sadly, Selene was never able to connect with Helios emotionally—never able to love him like a mother should. Like Theia had done with her, Selene tried to force a love of space onto Helios—to build a connection through a shared passion. She filled Helios’ room with space-related toys, books, and other decorations. But Helios, as with most children, had his own likes and dislikes. Rather than journeys through space, he dreamed of adventures below the waves. And while he tried to share his passion with his mother—inviting her into his imaginative world of make-believe—he only succeeded in driving them further apart.

What was once a lack of connection became outright neglect—with Selene opting to work late hours rather than come home. However, even this eventually transformed into outright physical abuse. She took out her frustrations on Helios. She would rap his knuckles till they bled and wake him up by strangling him. And when he would hide from the monster she would sometimes become, she would get even more violent—even breaking the lock on her living room door to get to him.

It all came to ahead one night when they were out driving. At 8:36 PM with “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” playing on the radio and Helios in the back seat asking nonsensical questions she didn’t understand, Selene came to the place where she and her mother had crashed into the lake all those years before. With the need to be free of her responsibilities as a single mother to a child she didn’t love suddenly overwhelming her, she swerved off the bridge and into the lake once more.

At first, Selene reacted on impulse and reached out to free Helios from his seatbelt (which he could not unlatch himself). Yet, she made the choice to save herself and left him to drown—though she regretted this moments after breaking the surface of the lake.

Having gotten away with both murders and, free from all her previous responsibilities as a mother and daughter, Selene redoubled her efforts to become an astronaut. However, at the same time she became ever more mentally unstable. Hounded by the guilt of what she had done, she escaped into delusions of her own making—using them to “keep her balanced.” She saw a psychiatrist and got on medication but after she failed to get a job at the Astra corporation—her last chance to become an astronaut—she went off her meds and had a complete mental break.

Her mind created a world where she did become an astronaut with Astra—where she had a life all her own. She was a deep space explorer tasked with walking on the surfaces of unknown, alien worlds.

But all too soon, even this wonderful dream became a nightmare as Selene’s guilt warped everything. The car crash happened again, reinterpreted within her sci-fi delusion. Now Helios was not her child, but her ship, and her subconscious need to understand his nonsensical final words was transformed into a quest to understand the mysterious “white shadow” signal emanating from this hostile alien world. Yet, the world itself was but a manifestation of her guilt. Each time she tried to run away from it, she would inevitably find herself overwhelmed—forced to relive the crash again and again. More than that, each loop she would once again abandon Helios—never fully understanding the symbolism behind her own actions. Yet even as she tried to escape from her guilt, part of herself was trying to make her remember and come to terms with all she had done. This was personified as the astronaut that haunted her throughout her journey.

Even when Selene finally escaped the hell planet and spent 63 years having a happy, idealized life on Earth—something that directly contrasted the space explorer fiction she had made for herself—it was all just a temporary escape. Her guilt reasserted itself and she was returned to the planet—though it was in a much different state from when she had last escaped. With the delusion weakening, the real-life events she tried so hard to hide from began to supplant the sci-fi trappings—with even the supposed ancient alien carvings now displaying her repressed thoughts.

Losing her sanity further and further even within her fantasy world, she was drawn to the watery depths of the planet—to the representation of the bottom of the lake where her car remained. There she came face-to-face with her made-up tormentor, an eldritch version of Octo, Helios’ stuffed toy octopus and only friend. It forced her to see what happened the night of the crash. However, Selene still managed to dodge her own guilt by inserting the astronaut into the scene—making it the astronaut’s fault she crashed into the lake, not hers.

However, in subsequent loops, she found herself driven to gather the sunface fragments—representing the dead Helios and her need to somehow fix what she had done. And once this was done, she was finally ready to confront the truth about her mother—that even if it was partially in self-defense, she had killed Theia. This, in turn allowed Selene to accept the other dark truth: she was the astronaut in her previous vision who caused the crash. It was she—not a mysterious astronaut or an otherworldly squid monster—that was responsible for Helios’ death.

Selene had killed both her mother and her son. And for that, she would suffer in a repeating hell of her own making for all eternity. In the end, she felt it was the punishment she so rightly deserved.

Top image source: Housemarque on Twitter.