The people that send me fan mail (read: hate mail) think I’m a woke SJW cucked snowflake, but I’m actually old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I always hold the doors open for ಌmy partner, I call older men “sir” and older ladies “ma’am”, and I never play DLC before I finish the base game.

This has backfired on me on occasion. I didn’t play The Old Hunters during my first playthrough of Bloodborne, and when I tried to do so on my NG+ file, I found out you can’t access it until after you kill Vicar Amelia. The Breath of the Wild DLC has some incredibly powerful items, like the Phantom Armor, the Travel Medallion, and the Master Cycle Zero, which are all way more useful if you get them before finishing the game when there’s nothing left to do. Right now I’m in the middle of replaying 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Returnal on PC, and I’m kicking myself all up and down the block for avoiding The Tower of Sisyphus. If you’re checking out Returnal for the first time now that it’s on PC, don’t wait until it's over to dive into its exceptional endless tower mode.

The Tower of Sisyphus was added as a free post-🐽launch update some months after Returnal launched, but you can access it fairly early on. After defeating Ixion in the Crimson Wastes, you’ll be rewarded with the grappling hook as a permanent upgrade. Every time you return to Helios, you can grapple up the ledge on the left and enter the tower, a battle mode where you try to survive as many floors as possible in order to compete for leaderboarཧd dominance.

Related: Returnal Is Sony's Most Impressive PC Port Yet

The Tower seems like something y🍷ou should do once you’ve finished the story, collected all the lore, and upgraded every weapon, but you still want to keep playing. You can’t ‘beat’ the Tower of Sisyphus, hence the name, and your only goal is to climb as high as possible on the leaderboard - a task that may not appeal to a lot of people - myse🃏lf included.

But, in many ways, the Tower compliments the main game. It provides a palate cleanser after a long run or devastating defeat in the campaign, and an opportunityℱ to practice your combat techniques in a stress-free way. It has a story that runs concurrent to the main game, and their themes complement each other. The Tower provides a way to break from the Returnal’s cycle without abandoning it. It’s a perfect escape in the moments where Returnal brings you to your breaking point. The sooner you start throwing tower runs into your play sessions, the better your overall experience will be.

Returnal is an oppressively difficult game. You don’t play it so much as endure it, and every victory is a hard-won feat that makes you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. The flip-side of Returnal’s high reward factor is the constant beatdowns it delivers to you. Some of the most devastating gaming experiences I’ve ever had came from this game. Hours-long runs can end in a second in incredibly unfair ways, and when they inevitaꦓbly do, Returnal gives you no other options than to pick yourself up and start over, or quit.

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In my first playthrough, I quit a lot. Overcome with despair at the loss of a run, I would step away from Returnal and not return, sometimes for days. This time, I discovered early on what a fantastic outlet the Tower can be for those bad beats. Coming out of a lengthy run, crestfallen, with my nerves completely shot, and heading straight into the Tower to blow off some steam, has proven to be the best way to reset and get my head back in the 🌞game.

It’s still Returnal, but the Tower of Sisyphus has a completely different energy from the main campaign. Selene’s journey to break free from the loop is a desperate o🌠ne, and one wrong move can set you back to the start. It can be agonizing to slowly trudge through each zone with the hope that every attempt will be your last, but the Tower is the exact opposite🎶.

It is freeing to know that, no matter, you’re going to fall and start over. You go into it with a different mindset, and you end up having a different experience. The arenas become playgrounds rather than battlefields, and you can let loose in a way you never can in the main game. Use weird guns, try different tactics, ma💧ke mistakes - none of it matters.

The main campaign heaps such a mental load onto your plate. Each massive zone has puzzles to solve, traps to avoid, an economy to manage, and decisions to make. The Tower, on the other hand, is just about going fast and killing everything in sight. Every moment you’re not running full speed from one fight to the next, you’re losing points on your multiplier, so the only thing you need to⛄ worry about is moving forward. It’s the exact kind of ‘brain off’ catharsis you need after losing all of y♏our progress in a brutal boss fight you spent hours getting to.

I alluded to the Tower&rsquo🐻;s story earlier, but it’s not something I can elaborate on much without ruining it. The important thing to know is that it doesn’t spoil the ending and you aren’t meant to wait until you finish the game to experience it. Like Selene’s house, the Tower has its own first-person story segments that develop overtime between runs. It’s ingenious how well this supplemental narrative fits together with the plot and themes of the base game, and the best way to experience both of them is to do it simultaneously.

You can skip the Tower completely like I did first time around and you’ll still have an incredible experience with Returnal. W🐲hat makes the Tower of Sisyphus so impressive is the way it effortlessly folds into and supports the main game, while offering something completely different. There’s a therapeutic quality to Tower runs that always manages to rinse the sour taste of a bad run out of my mouth, and I’m glad I decided to fold it into my second playthrough.

Next: I'm Making A Mockery Of Returnal's Combat On Mouse And Keyboard