Returnal Gets New Suspend Feature; Gets Exploited For Easier Progress

What do they say about the best of intentions and the eventual road to Hell? Returnal’s most recent update introduces a Suspend Cycle feature where players can pause their cycle and continue it later. Players can turn off their consoles and continue the game at a later time.

Turns out there’s a way to make it a reusable save point for the game, which wasn’t the intention of developer Housemarque. Initially, the developers said that it was simply a single-use save state, not so much a “Save Game” option. The feature can’t be used during boss battles, cinematics, first-person sequences, or intense combat.

“By suspending the cycle, Returnal will simply create a single-use suspend point, and once you resume playing the suspend point is deleted and cannot be used again”.

How do players manipulate it? Here’s a step-by-step according to Twitter user Joseph Yaden:

• Suspend your save in-game.
• Upload that save to cloud.
• When you die, download the save from cloud.
• Start back at your suspension point.

So far, many folks have tried the exploit and it seems to work for them. You know what they say: don’t hate the player, hate the game. And if your game has an exploit that doesn’t sour other people’s fun, just roll with it.