Return from Core Review - Dungeon Diving With Scantily Clad Women
Return from Core is a sandbox adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic underground world. You navigate through the space by carving tunnels with your pickaxe, which allows you to find resources, schematics, and ruins. As you explore, you progress the story and discover what happened to humanity—and ultimately strive to return to the surface.
Return from Core is the first title released by Tanxun Studio, an independent game studio based in Shanghai, China. Apparently, Tanxun was created after its founders won the lottery and quit their jobs, deciding to follow their dreams of developing videogames instead.
You can see the way other games have influenced the DNA of Return from Core. The underground exploration and aesthetic is clearly influenced by games like Core Keeper, but you would be underestimating this game to think it’s a clone. In particular, Return from Core adds automation systems and Monster Girl dating sim mechanics.
The core game loop of Return from Core is enjoyable, especially in the first level, before automation becomes the emphasis. Unfortunately, the aspects of this game that make it unique from similar titles are the aspects that are the least enjoyable. The automation system isn’t just an optional way to improve production; it quickly becomes compulsory for progressing quests. However, it’s not as well-implemented as in automation-specific games like Factorio.
Similarly, there are companions in the game who can join your team or complete tasks for you around your base, but the ‘Affection’ mechanics with them aren’t as polished as they would be in a dating sim. Quests are useful for driving progress and letting you know what you might want to do next, but I often ran into situations where they would either over-tutorialise a mechanic I had already used or under-explain something and leave me feeling confused. The game loses some depth in its attempt to add complexity.
Something about the design and dialogue of the Monster Girl companions makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m fine with flirtation in games—and I’ve played many dating sims in my time—but I just kept wondering whether Return from Core was about to progress into full-blown pornography. (It never did, but it kept threatening to.) Every Monster Girl is scantily clad and a little too forward; one of the early interactions you have with Lilith involves her bathing in a hot spring, partially covered in a towel and goading the innocent player-character. It plays into a lot of stereotypes and tropes with the shy boy protagonist and hypersexualised harem of NPCs.
This may partially be due to the issues with the game’s translation. The dialogue and UI are comprehensible, but they feel robotic and are sometimes a bit confusing. It feels like the game lost some of its personality as it was transcribed into English, and the result is as awkward as the player-character.
Despite the hypersexualised characters and strange translation issues, the gameplay is fun. Combat is simple but still rewarding, and there is a constant string of dopamine to collect as you mine through the world and collect everything that isn’t nailed down. However, controller support is currently quite lacking, so if you like to mine endlessly from the comfort of your couch, you might need to wait for that to be fixed or updated.
Base-building is also enjoyable, with plenty of options for workbenches, furniture, and farming plots to choose from when creating the perfect bunker to share with your Monster Girls. If you haven’t asked a Monster Girl to actively be part of your team and come exploring with you, they will stay home and do tasks in your base—like moving items from the cooking pot to storage or watering and harvesting crops. The way NPCs move around and interact makes the world feel alive—and, honestly, they’re more reliable than some of the automated resource collection systems that you need to build later on using machinery and conveyor belts.
For every fun mechanic Return from Core has to offer, it comes with an equally frustrating or confusing system. The best parts of Return from Core could be found with more depth in other games, and the unique elements of this game are lacking polish. Although there are many areas where this game could improve with future updates, I still feel that this is an impressive first title from Tanxun Studio, and I look forward to seeing what they make next.
Return from Core was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
