Returnal is now officially three years old and to celebrate the occasion, developer Housemarque announced that fans will be able to buy a Returnal artbook and a new comic, Returnal Fallen Asteria, in the future.
Table of Contents
The Returnal artbook and the Fallen Asteria graphic novel
The artbook is exactly what you think it is: a book explaining how the game was created, with concept art included since Housemarque needed to be told how things were going to look in their game. As for Returnal Fallen Asteria, its description on the Dark Horse website says that it’ll be an adaptation of the game in graphic novel form. The writers will be Greg Louden, Eevi Korhone, Khalil Osaimi (all of whom worked on the game), and Igor Lomov. Lomov and Aaron Järvinen will be the comic’s cover artists and interior artists.
Fallen Asteria will be 88 pages long and both it and the artbook will be published by Dark Horse, a comic book and artbook publisher known for pushing out other video game artbooks and comics like The Witcher, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect series. They’re also responsible for publishing other comics and manga like Hellboy, Berserk, The Goon, and The Umbrella Academy. The Returnal artbook and Returnal Fallen Asteria will drop on the same day, October 23, and you can pre-order both through Amazon.
What is Returnal?
A sci-fi game that’s also a roguelike bullet-hell, Returnal was released by Housemarque back in 2021. The story follows Selene Vassos, who crash lands on the planet Atropos as she is in search of the “White Shadow” signal. Since this is a violent video game, Atropos is teeming with enemies eager to rip Selene apart, though she’ll be able to defend herself with weapons and upgrades she can pick up.
What makes things interesting, however, is the fact that every time the leading lady dies, she wakes back up on her downed ship, since she’s also stuck in a time loop (this is a roguelike, like I mentioned just now). Selene will also discover audio recordings of herself, as well as her own dead bodies during her adventure, with players learning about the main character’s history as they progress through the story.
Housemarque updated the game after release to include a two-player co-op mode (for those of you who actually have friends and are liked by them) as well as the Tower of Sisyphus challenge mode. Selene can tackle the Tower to obtain more audio recordings of herself, exclusive items only available in the Tower and witness parts of her past not seen in the main campaign.
