A brilliant artistic design is bolstered by further impressive effects work - from physicalised dust clouds to beautifully realised rain, along with lit froxel-based volumetric lighting for intense beams of light from the moon overhead. Callbacks to Sci-Fi genre classics are plenty, but I particularly enjoyed the ankle and knee-height fog effects, reminiscent of the egg hatchery in Alien. If you're a regular Digital Foundry reader or viewer, you'll know that I'm fascinated and delighted by the rapid adoption of ray tracing to the point where I still find the inclusion of hardware-accelerated RT in a games console to be borderline miraculous. Returnal is said to support ray tracing effects, which initially left me puzzled. We're clearly not seeing RT reflections here, it's standard screen-space effects. Ambient occlusion also sees what looks like a conventional screen-space implementation. The PlayStation blog mentions RT for lighting, which initially made me think it could be some kind of bespoke global illumination implementation.