Just turn off the rumble, it's a gimmick. It gives zero feels to the overall experience, at least for me.
It’s one of those games where dying takes you way, way back. When the game is well balanced, I don’t mind, but this one is pretty easy as you go along and then the boss is so much more difficult than anything before. So you die and start over and do it again and again. But because the initial part of the game is pretty easy, you don’t really get much better in the lead up to the first boss.
Normally developers include accessibility controls to make the game enjoyable for everybody, but the Returnal developers didn’t. They want you to play their way, or not at all. I ended up choosing the latter. They got my money though, so I suppose in the end, they won.
While Valve’s hardware uses a different form of rumble than the ones that Sony and co. got sued for back in the day — linear resonant actuators (LRA), rather than an eccentrically swinging weight on a shaft — that didn’t stop Nintendo from signing an agreement with Immersion to bring its technology to the Switch, which uses LRAs as well. So does Sony’s DualSense, for that matter.
immersion didn't invent LRAs. their claim is that the use of LRAs vs swinging weights is irrelevant; that any vibration haptics via any means would constitute a patent infringement.
ex. 1: Global game jam game where one player has to only use rumble to achieve thier goal, the dev then went to make games for blind people, and rumble is still very much part of them. It definitely feels gimmicky but it kinda opened my eye to the fact that people perceive different parts of games in different ways, depending on their disabilities
ex 2: in Beat saber, rumble tells you when your controller hits something, it becomes such an important part of the experience that when my index controllers lost rumble I had to quit playing. Without being able to watch everywhere at all times, the haptic feedback becomes vital to knowing if you hit that note you were aiming for while focusing elsewhere.