Returnal Returns With A New Expansion, And It’s Completely FREE!

For Playstation 5 owners, Returnal has been one of the few great releases of 2021. Almost a year after its release, they have announced a free expansion which releases on March 22, 2022. That’s right, Returnal is back with a bang!

Dubbed as “Ascension”, this new expansion will feature two new game modes. The first one is a two-player co-op mode, which allows the user to create and join both public and private lobbies alike. Furthermore, players can join either at the beginning of the session or even midway into it through the use of a Chronosis portal.

Harry Krueger, Returnal’s game director, introduced the second game mode called “Tower of Sisyphus”, an endless game mode that, in his words, is “intended to provide some new secrets, new narrative, new content, and a new endless challenge for players to sink their teeth into. “We wanted to take the strongest elements of Returnal’s combat and distill them into a very focused package full of intense action.”, Krueger explains.

“Similar to a lot of the endless modes that we have made in the past, the Tower of Sisyphus also tracks your progress from room to room and phase to phase. There’s also a score that will measure your success in each round, and in order to get the best possible score, you’ll have a multiplier that you need to keep alive as well. This would be a very familiar element to players who have been accustomed with our previous games, and we felt that this is a great way to add some depth and replayability to Returnal through a familiar package but with an entirely new twist.”, he adds.

Each level in the tower will be procedurally generated so no two runs will be similar. You will find different kinds of rooms in the Tower of Sisyphus that will give you either a different type of challenge or a different type of reward as you move higher. In order to get a higher score, you must kill all the enemies and go through the Translocator as fast as you can. Doing so will also give you a bonus to your oboe lights, one of the resources in the game you’ll use to fabricate items and other artifacts.

Whether you play Returnal with a friend in co-op mode or strive to get the top score on the Tower of Sisyphus, expect Ascension to breathe new life into a game that is still in peak form. This free expansion will give Returnal a ton of replayability (as if it didn’t have that already), and will be ready for download on March 22, 2022.