Returnal guide: Integrity and increasing health

You’ll need to jump, dash, and dodge plenty of enemy attacks to stay alive in Returnal. However, no matter how well you play, you’re going to get hit. Also, you don’t start the game with a lot of health. Thankfully, you can increase your suit integrity to boost the amount of life you have.

In this Returnal guide, we’ll show you how to increase suit integrity, explain how to use resin to boost your suit’s max integrity, and show you what to pay attention to so you know when you’re extending your life bar.

How to increase suit integrity

At the start of each run of Returnal, you’ll always have the same amount of base health. This health can be increased by finding certain items.

To the left of your health bar, you’ll see three slots. When you fill up all three of them, you will increase your max integrity.

Image: Housemarque/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

To increase your health in Returnal, you need to find resin. You will discover these health items throughout the game by looking for their green plus-shaped icon on your minimap. When you see this icon on your map, it can either be a piece of silphium, which increases the health you already have, or resin.

When you pick up a piece of resin, it has the chance to fill one or two slots toward your max integrity.

As you add to your base health, a new life bar will appear to the right of your initial pool of health. As you further increase your suit’s integrity, this bar will grow. You can even get a Returnal trophy for increasing your suit integrity to 200%.

Image: Housemarque/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

You can also come across malignant resin, which acts the same as normal resin but has a chance to cause a malfunction.

If you choose to take it as is, you will fill the slots you need to increase your max integrity, but malignant resin has a chance to give you a malfunction. You can cleanse malignant resin, but it’s not the best use for ether.