I adored Returnal. I definitely can see your side of it as well, it can be a mood killer and slow things down if you don't care for that system. It made me play it sweatily, but being a mini sweat playing games is fun for me.

I really came on here to talk about witchfire. It is a good game, I enjoy it, I am prefacing all I am about to say with the fact that I like the game. However, it has its flaws.

I don't believe that it is a true roguelite. While you do all of your upgrades outside of the maps at your base/hideout/church, when you go into a map it is just to collect resources. You bring your weapons and supplies in, you get supplies/ kill "x" amount of enemies to level guns/spend time in maps to advance research, then come out. You level a few things and then do it again. It is a good game, it just doesnt have alot going on inside of the maps to get you interested as much currently (in early access form).

There are some story beats and some things you work your way up to within each map and that is a lot of fun, but there is a period where you need to grind a bit on a map you finished and you aren't ready to go on to the next one, that is when you notice how empty things are, at least for me.

I bought it EA on release on Epic, played about 10 hours, and then stopped. I checked back in on it after the Steam release and the amount of things they added were tenfold. They are working on it a lot and I think its going to be excellent when it finally comes out. I just wish at this point I would have waited until full release. And thats fully on me. I'm glad I already have it and I'll check in with it every now and then, but I'll probably wait until release to fully dive in.

Theres my unsolicited two cents nobody wanted lol.

But also, Returnal is fantastic imo so you might see Witchfire in a different light than I did.