Returnal, one of the best dang games of the year where you play as Celine Die-on, represents a turning point for developer Housemarque. Up until the release of this grand game, the studio had largely been focused on creating smaller and pure arcade experiences, but Returnal takes that insert coin DNA that made previous games such as Nex Machina and Resogun so memorable, and expanded on it with a bigger serving of AAA sauce.

Returnal's most brutal boss is its lack of a save system, as switching the game off results in a complete restart of its cycle. Since its release, many players have asked developer Housemarque to add some sort of a traditional save-system to the game, but the developer says that doing so isn't exactly simple.

Returnal's a pretty solidly-designed game overall, with only the most minor of bugs occasionally cropping up and making a current run through its biomes that much more challenging. Biome, what a fun word to say. Like any game in the modern age, developer Housemarque had a patch locked and loaded to fix up any lingering issues, but the latest update may have had the unfortunate side-effect of uh…wiping save-games.

If you're having trouble getting past a certain biome, good news! You can make the initial grind a little bit easier using cheat codes in the game. Or more specifically, debug codes.

Honestly, the fact that Darryn and I were able to pull this off for sixteen weeks without killing each other is nothing short of a miracle.

Before you get started on Returnal, here's a few pointers to help you survive the long fight ahead of you.

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Stuck on alien planet. Dying constantly. Being revived to repeat the nightmare all over again…things could be worse, right? Right! Because not only is Housemarque’s game a riff on time loops, it also happens to be Groundhog Day smashed together with Event Horizon judging by the interstellar mental nastiness on display. Which of course calls for that classic sci-fi trope: Tentacles. Lots and lots of tentacles.