Housemarque recently introduced a ‘Suspend Cycle‘ feature to Returnal in response to requests for a Save Game option. However, rather than allowing players to save their progress in a traditional manner, Suspend Cycle only allows a single-use suspend point, which means that if you play a little bit and want to suspend the cycle again, your game will continue from the new point onwards.
Players weren’t having it, though, and immediately set out to find a way to exploit Suspend Cycle and figure out how to save their progress. And it turns out, you can. As pointed out by journalist Joseph Yaden, once you suspend your cycle and quit, you can upload your save data to cloud. Should you die, just download the save file from your cloud storage and you’ll start exactly where you last suspended. Voila!
I’ve gotta say — this method is singlehandedly getting me through Returnal. I know people are mad that I’m not playing it “the right” way, but I don’t have time to continuously die and restart over and over. I’m now enjoying it because of this and I think that’s a positive thing. https://t.co/VnKumA7dIh
— Joseph Yaden (@JosephYaden) October 31, 2021
It remains to be seen if Housemarque will plug this loophole or not. The developer recently said that it came up with Suspend Cycle as a middle ground between full saves and lack of saves because “there are certain moments in Returnal that are best experienced unfragmented to preserve the intended challenge and flow.” However, it seems that a lot of players are enjoying Returnal just as much with the exploit.
