Returnal was in development for "four years plus some"

We've been quite content with singing the praises of Housemarque's latest PS5-exclusive roguelike Returnal, ever since it released on the platform in late April (we even gave it a great review). But as with anything we wanted to know more about the game, so our very own Eirik caught up with Housemarque's marketing director Mikael Haveri to chat all things about the game, and discovered that Returnal was in development for "four years plus some", and that Returnal was "platform agnostic from the get-go".

"We do have about four years of development in it [Returnal], and some early concepting prior to that," said Haveri. "We didn't announce anything until last year with the PlayStation 5 announcement, but yes - it has been four years plus some."

Haveri continued further saying, "We've been on the forefront of multiple console generations, so we are always aware of upcoming changes and everything. The game does change quite a bit during the early pre-production and the stages you start defining the sculpt, so in the early days it was a very different game. Little by little we started realising the potential for the PlayStation 5, and then we started getting in the specs and the ideas of what hardware we should aim for. It is a multi-year process because a lot of that information isn't one single dump, but we get it little-by-little information as we go. We were platform agnostic from the get-go, but the sculpt and everything scaled up quite a lot as we were able to prove ourselves."

For more Returnal content, be sure to watch our Gamereactor Review Talk below, where we discuss our thoughts on the PS5 title.