‘I try to play as a completionist and leave no stone unturned and no enemy unkilled’: Returnal director Harry Krueger talks Deus Ex, Resident Evil, and the arcade classic that inspired Housemarque’s best games

Harry Krueger didn’t get into PC gaming until early adulthood, but that all changed when he encountered the deathmatch thrills of Quake 3: Arena. “I went from zero to hero, basically. I went from never having a PC ever in my life to setting up a LAN and getting Quake 3: Arena and Tiberian Sun and Red Alert,” he says. “We’d gather with friends over in Greece, and we’d play in my house with two teams, and had a friendly—and sometimes not so friendly—competition.”

Krueger entered the games industry as a programmer for Finnish developer Housemarque, where he worked on the studio’s early titles like Outland and Resogun. He assumed the role of Game Director for 2017’s Nex Machina, serving in the same role for 2021’s bullet-hell roguelike Returnal, which won four BAFTAs in 2022, including the award for best game.

Leaving Housemarque that same year, Krueger has now established his own studio—Cosmic Division, which is working on its first title. “We want to be a lean and mean studio that makes evocative gameplay-first experiences,” he says. Krueger says CD’s debut game will inherit the arcade action DNA of Housemarque’s finest works. “I think players will also be pleasantly surprised,” he adds.

Krueger hit pause on his latest game development run to show me around the bullet-riddled tower of his PC, a journey that took us from PC gaming’s heartland to the lofty heights of the arcade shooter.

What game are you currently playing?

I do carve out time for games that are really important to me, and recently I managed to play Resident Evil: Requiem. I’m a huge Resident Evil fan, and I honestly had pretty high expectations for Requiem and it definitely delivered on all of them. I think it’s a phenomenal mixture of action and horror, the power fantasy and the vulnerability. I think it’s up there with the very best of the series.

The gunplay and the action, all the set pieces are incredibly satisfying, and I always love the exploration in Resident Evil games, the keys and secrets. I’m a bit of a completionist, so I do enjoy going through all the nooks and crannies, and the horror elements were masterfully designed and executed as well.

I’ve already finished the game once, but it’s one of the few games that, once the credits rolled, I felt like I wanted to play this again. I haven’t had time to jump back in yet—I started a little bit, and I predict that once I catch a breather, I’ll be going in to complete another playthrough as much as I can.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I finally got around to playing Return to Monkey Island … I’ve always cherished the Monkey Island series, and I felt like the latest instalment was a true return to form.

I really enjoyed the puzzles. The characters were endearing. The humour was top-notch. I think it was a wonderful experience. I do enjoy getting stuck on puzzles and having those big breakthrough moments. To be honest, I did think it was a little bit easier on average than the first three in the series that I’ve enjoyed the most.

It’s interesting—we were talking about horror before, that it’s difficult to nail effectively. But I do feel that, in some ways, getting a consistently high calibre of humour is the hardest thing to nail across any media. Monkey Island is one of the very few series I feel has succeeded the most at that. Just getting that high quality, endearing, sweet spot of humour.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It’s the original Deus Ex, which was released around 2000. So it was actually around the time I started playing PC games. Deus Ex is one of my favourite games of all time. I really appreciate the incredible mixture of exploration action, the meaningful decision making, and I still consider it maybe the best cyberpunk story ever told.

It’s always one of the first games that, when I [get a new PC], I just instinctively reinstall it. It’s been a few years since I’ve had a chance to play it, and I feel it’s well overdue for a replay. I like having it there because I feel like I can jump in and give it another spin sometime soon. I may be a hopeless romantic. I do cherish these experiences that make us who we are, and I find it genuinely beneficial and inspiring to revisit some of these games that help shape us.

I like to play mostly stealth. I like to find all of the keypad codes. I try to play as a completionist and leave no stone unturned and no enemy unkilled. But that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s so rich with possibilities and you can just approach it any way you like, and the decision making as well. I always try to be a bit of a good guy or try to complete side quests. But I find the characters, the writing so endearing as well, that I always enjoy it, even though I’ve experienced it so many times. The music as well is just fantastic.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Apparently I have over 200 hours in Tetris Effect. I’m a huge Tetris fan. I used to play it religiously [on] my original black and white Game Boy. I used to carry it around everywhere with me, and I spent countless quarters at the arcade machine as well. And it’s an interesting game, because there are hundreds of Tetris versions and clones out there. But I think it’s a good example of a design that’s super simple and easy to execute, but it takes a lot of finesse to execute well.

It’s a good reference when it comes to game-feel because you know you can make it functional, but getting it to feel crunchy and satisfying and getting that satisfying impact loop, it takes a lot of effort for something to feel effortless. I think Tetris Effect is a great example of how to take a simple and timeless formula and give it a breath of fresh air and elevate it to new heights.

I finished all the singleplayer content, and nowadays I play the Zone mode. I play that almost exclusively nowadays. That’s my go-to game when I want to just kick back and play something without really overthinking it and enter that instant flow state.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

The best candidate for this, I’d say, is probably Ikaruga. I think this is a treasure at its very finest, and perhaps unsurprisingly—it’s good that you’re sitting down for this—but it’s one of my favourite and most influential games of all time.

I adore everything about this. The gameplay. The music is phenomenal. The bullet patterns. The bosses. It’s such a cohesive, beautiful package. And somehow, when I think of poetry-in-motion with games, Ikaruga is usually the first game that comes to mind.

It probably comes as no surprise that I often went back to this game and other shooters of that era for inspiration when working on games like Nex Machina and Returnal, Resogun before that and Outland, even. It’s not only for the bullet-hell gameplay that it has, but also for the elegance and beauty of its formula, and how minimalistic but effective its narrative is.

There’s something really special about it for me. Even though I’m not actively replaying it constantly, there’s something comforting and soothing about just having it always installed. It’s like having an old friend nearby who reminds you of who you are.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

Just in terms of a tool that I use a lot, it’s PureRef. It’s basically an image collection and organising tool for mood boards. I’m a very visual person, and I enjoy collecting image references, organising spatially in groups. So when working on new game pitches like, for example, Returnal, I often lean heavily on PureRef for collecting a lot of the raw reference materials. You get a lot of different images and different ideas with texture and themes, and then you start seeing patterns, and then you start organising them and start bringing some structure and order into the chaos, so to speak.

I find it almost like a distillation process that you have all these raw materials in one large vat, and then you slowly, iteratively distil it down to the bare essentials.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I think [it’s] pretty tidy. Not obsessively so. But I mentioned PureRef and how I like to have things spatially organised, that just makes sense for me and my workflow. I have some project-related stuff in the top right corner. I have some music-related stuff in the top—I dabble with music on occasion as a hobbyist. My recycling is in the bottom right corner. The left, that’s where usually some of the new random [files] live.

I do have those moments where I get a glimpse at my desktop [and] it bothers me a bit. When it piles up enough and it starts to bother me, I just clear those up. I might have a few folders that are ‘Temp’ on the desktop that might have been temp for like a decade.