In October of last year, developer Fantastic, Yes released a visually stunning point-and-click adventure game called Returner 77 ($4.99). It wasn’t quite a traditional point-and-click and was actually more akin to a first-person puzzler like The Witness blended with the fantastic The Room series. The formula totally worked and along with becoming something of a fan favorite amongst our community we also loved it a lot in our own review. Then this past September the developers released a follow up to Returner 77 called Returner Zhero ($4.99). It featured even more impressive visuals and fleshed out the strange universe that both games take place in. The concept was really solid and we enjoyed Returner Zhero in our review, but there were a couple of issues that held the game back from true greatness.

One of those was that the story, which is a main selling point of a game like Returner Zhero, was tough to follow and not as clear as it should have been. You could just ignore following the story and just enjoy solving the puzzles, but that’s sort of a shame, you know? The other big complaint from players was that the movement in Returner Zhero was very stiff and didn’t always work as it should, creating some frustrating moments during play. Well over the past couple of months Fantastic, Yes has been hard at work on what they’re calling the Final Cut update for Returner Zhero which, among many other things, should fix those chief complaints of the initial release version.

So in addition to tweaking the controls and the story flow, the Final Cut update also adds in a ton of new content. There are new levels and new puzzles to solve which results in more than an hour of additional gampelay, including new audio and video clips of story stuff to enjoy. There’s also a new collectibles system so that players have a new set of goals and progression to work towards. Finally the graphics have somehow been improved over the already incredibly gorgeous visuals of the original release. If you initially played Returner Zhero and it just didn’t click with you, now would be a good time to give it another shot to see if this latest update has improved the experience for you. If you’re completely new to the Returner series, a good place to start would be with Returner 77 Lite which will give you access to the beginning portion of the first game for free, and if you enjoy it you can either unlock the full game with IAP or buy the paid full version. And then once you’re finished with that game, you’ll have Returner Zhero waiting for you. It’s not totally necessary to play the games in order as they essentially take place at the same time, but I think you’ll get more out of Zhero having played 77 first. Either way this is a series that you shouldn’t sleep on if you’re a fan of puzzle adventures and awesome sci-fi settings.