Returnal – the upcoming third person shooter, roguelike and PlayStation 5 exclusive – now has more about itself revealed thanks to a new trailer.

The story trailer, embedded below, doesn’t reveal much if we’re honest. From it we can see that player character Selene is an astronaut involved in some mission gone wrong that sees her stuck in some timey wimey shenanigans that involves lots of shooting.

In the trailer we get a look at a lot of the combat too, and more weird time and space distortions with Selene seemingly stumbling into a house that shouldn’t be on what looks like an alien planet.

Right at the end of the trailer we also see some elderly hands playing a piano. Do those belong to an older Selene? Probably. Again this game is banking heavily on some non-linear time fun.

We can learn a bit more thanks to the official PlayStation Blog. Greg Louden, the Narrative Designer and developer Housemarque has penned a post explaining some of what we see in the trailer.

“For the first time in [Selene’s] career she goes against orders to travel to the alien planet Atropos to follow the ‘White Shadow’ broadcast signal. Upon arrival she crash lands in an alien forest. Here she discovers the ruins of an alien civilisation filled with statues, gates, xeno-tech, and alien corpses. But she’s not alone. The planet’s surface is teeming with hostile creatures that attack Selene on sight, as well as other threats left by the world’s former inhabitants,” reads the outline of the setting from Louden.

It is further explained that, upon death, players will awaken in the cockpit of of Selene’s ship moments before impact, and then left to try again after exiting the crash site. Changes in the world make each playthrough unique, which is an expected staple of roguelikes.

You can read Louden’s full post titled “Four mysteries from the new story trailer answered“, but we do have to warn that some of it can be considered in spoiler territory, so maybe give it a miss if you want to go in completely blind. We’ve only talked about basic gameplay and premises here.

We’re big fans of roguelikes and we like what we’re seeing so far with this game, but with PlayStation 5 stock shortages still prevalent with no improvements in sight, we have to wonder about how many people will miss this game.

Returnal is scheduled for release on 30th April 2021 exclusively on the PS5.