Once you’ve selected your character, you’ll then be tasked with fighting through a series of five randomized combat encounters that take place over familiar locations visited throughout the campaign, such as Jackson, the Suburbs, the TV Station, the Forest, the Resort, and the Hospital, to name a few.
While these locations may be familiar, how you play them will be entirely new and unique, thanks to the gameplay twists of the four brand-new game modes featured across each encounter.
Eventually, if you manage to survive all five encounters, the run will culminate in a boss fight ranging from six memorable bosses, such as the Arcade Bloater, the Rattler Captain, the Seraphite Elite, and even the infamous Rat King. Which boss you face will be entirely dependent on the bosses you currently have unlocked via challenge completions.
It’s crucial to note that death is permanent in No Return, as all acquired weapons, resources, items, and upgrades are reset, and a new set of randomized maps will be generated when starting a new run.
As mentioned, each run will feature a series of randomized combat encounters; however, it’s entirely up to you which encounters you decide to tackle, as each run has six potential routes that will all offer unique locations, game modes, enemy factions, rewards, and even modifications that could potentially land you at a significant advantage or disadvantage.
With plenty to weigh up, it’s important to strategize your routes, taking into consideration the game modes you’ll face and what supplies or potential upgrades you’ll want to have for the inevitable boss fight that occurs at the end of each run.
All No Return Game Modes Explained
Below is a complete list of all four game modes that can be played and unlocked across each of the unique encounter opportunities in No Return:
- Assault – Automatically Unlocked
- In Assault, groups of enemies spawn in waves. Their initial knowledge of your position varies per encounter. Use the downtime between waves to heal and resupply.
- Capture – Unlocked After Playing 7 Runs
- In Capture, the enemies are guarding a safe filled with valuable supplies. It will lock when the timer expires. You can use stealth to approach the safe and open it before all enemies are defeated.
- Hunted Mode – Automatically Unlocked
- In Hunted, you must survive against continuous enemy reinforcements until the timer runs out.
- Holdout – Unlocked After Playing 5 Runs
- In Holdout, you and an ally will be attacked by a swarm of infected. Use the supplies in the area to set up your defense. You will fail the encounter if your ally is killed.
Custom and Daily Runs Explained
Before starting No Return, Naughty Dog clearly states that the game mode shouldn’t be jumped into immediately, as the mode was developed to challenge the skills you developed throughout the campaign.
Simply put, Naughty Dog wasn’t lying, as encounters throughout No Return often encourage a faster-than-usual pace of gameplay, and it truly doesn’t take much for one little mistake to turn an entire run south in just a mere few seconds.
Thankfully, No Return features several difficulty options and custom parameters, as well as the ability to customize the entire rule of No Return through Custom Runs, which are unlocked after playing just one standard run – whether failed or completed.
When setting up a Custom Run, you can alter the game modes that appear, the enemies and bosses you’ll face, the mods you want enabled, the gambits and mechanics, and much more.
If you’re looking to compete against friends or simply wish to share a particular run you may have found enjoyable, you can use Custom Runs to create and enter custom seeds – which is essentially the code used to generate the string of encounters you’ll face.
When entering a custom seed, each time you load up that Custom Run, you’ll receive the exact same encounters, locations, game modes, and even mods. In order for this to work, you will need to ensure others are using your same selected settings.
So, whether you’re looking for a much easier experience or want to create something even more restricting and challenging, Custom Runs will allow you to fully customize runs based on your needs and wants.
Custom Runs will not impact your ability to complete challenges.
Furthermore, if you’re looking for a challenge and want to compete against other players worldwide, you can unlock the Daily Run game mode by playing through nine runs of No Return – whether they’re successful or not.
During this mode, you’ll have one attempt per day to complete the same randomly generated run as everyone else. Your score will be placed on a leaderboard, where you can compare how your score and runtime fared against other players.