Returnal: How To “Save” Your Game

Big emphasis on "save".

Returnal Reconstructor
Returnal Reconstructor

Returnal is a very tough game, one in which death will come in the blink of an eye and all your progress is lost. There’s also no way to save your game in the traditional sense, as the cycle will begin anew if you close the app on your PS5. Luckily, though, there are a few things you can do to save your progress in a different sense, or at least to keep your run going.

The first and most prominent way to “save” your game is to use a Reconstructor.

These strange structures can be entered in exchange for six Ether, allowing Selene to come back to life if she dies, sort of like a revive machine or Vita-Chamber in BioShock. Everything you did in the biome up to your point of death will still have happened, meaning that you can finish off a tricky fight with roughly half your health also returned.

It seems that there is roughly one Reconstructor per biome, and you can find them by going through every side objective door on your map (the ones that look like a triangle) until you hit the right one. If you die in a much later biome, you will return to the nearest Reconstructor you have used.

Another way to, not necessarily save your game but to save your run is to find the Astronaut Figurine and Child’s Watch items, both of which you unlock from visiting Selene’s house and uncovering her backstory. These will bring you back to life right where you are upon death with a small window of invincibility, so they’re very clutch for boss fights.

Just keep visiting Selene’s house until they both unlock; you can enter the house roughly after every boss encounter or a major story beat unfolds. Once unlocked, they will randomly spawn like the rest of the loot in the game, but can also be purchased from Fabricators.

Returnal is available now on PS5.

READ NEXT: 5 Games Like Returnal You Should Check Out

Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.

Editor-in-Chief