Finished all the endings of Returnal. I might have been a little harsh on the game with my first post, it's not that bad of a game. The different biomes are pretty nice looking and atmospheric, and the gameplay is fine, though I still think bullet hell and over the shoulder shooter aren't the best mix. Sometimes there is just an absurd number of projectiles on the screen, including the stupid rings that move through floors and walls and can completely blindside you. If you are using the pylon driver it can sometimes be difficult to see anything at all. Some better colour coding of player vs enemy projectiles would have helped with that. The game gets significantly easier later in a run. I never died on the third biome in either act (though on my winning run in act 2 I did finish the second biome boss with a single pixel of health left). I still think that the main campaign is not a good roguelite and combing through the same rooms for pickups over and over is just not fun (especially with the money dropping roots in biome 4 that you have to spend minutes chopping up). The Tower on the other hand is a lot of fun, and made the fact that I had to go back to each biome to find a collectible and then refight the final boss to get the 'true ending' completely tedious. I have no idea why they felt they needed to pad out the game like that. Honestly, I was expecting that once I beat Act 2 I would have to do all 6 biomes in one run and beat all the bosses. That would have been worthy of an Act 3, but no.
Speaking of endings, after getting them all I can definitively say that the story is complete nonsense. There are no answers, just endless symbolism and drivel. Maybe she's really on an alien planet, stuck in a death loop, or maybe it's an endless trauma dream as a result of running into herself with her car causing her to crash into a lake and kill her child, and also something about her mother, whom she didn't get along with. You decide. Personally, I don't care, I hate this style of writing and find it amateurish. It's easy to come up with a mystery hook to spark interest, but resolving it in a way that is cohesive on retrospect is the hard part. An open ending just dodges the issue completely by not actually having a resolution. I don't care if it's supposed to be up to audience interpretation, I'm not going to put in the effort of figuring out a way that this all makes sense when the author couldn't be bothered to.