Kirk Hamilton

Yes, and this was clearly a lesson Housemarque learned.

They added that function to Returnal.

Yeah, and this game is much more player-friendly.

In that way, we talked about getting the extra life in Returnal.

That was always something you would find, and if you played thoroughly, you would typically find what was called an astronaut, and that was your extra life, which was very nice to have, but you had to find it on each run.

In this game, you just have one.

Like, I have an extra life all the time, which feels incredibly luxurious.

And then, as we've mentioned as well, you can actually unlock modifiers for the planet itself after the second boss and make the game way too easy for yourself, I think, if you want to just plow through it and see the story.

So it's a way more approachable game.

My guess is that that's because...

probably some terrifying small percentage of people actually finished Returnal.

And Housemarque was like, well, it would be nice if people actually finished Sturgeon and saw the whole thing.

So I'm assuming that's kind of where they're coming from.

Yeah, I wonder.

I think, you know, it gets back to something we talked about when we talked about different types of difficulty on the show where, you know, this game is difficult in that pure mechanical way.

It just is mechanically difficult.

But then Returnal was a much more emotionally difficult game because of the length of the runs, the amount of lost progress, the daunting feeling of having had an insanely good build and everything you needed and then having screwed up or worse, having that power go out.

Yeah.

You lose your progress.

Where in this game, the emotional difficulty is significantly lower, which is nice, though also just different.