Finnish studio Housemarque’s Returnal, released in 2021, was a standout early title for the Sony PlayStation 5. The game follows an astronaut stuck on an alien planet brimming with enemies influenced by cosmic horror. Players were hooked by its challenging, yet strangely balletic action.
The studio isn’t straying too far from its roots with Saros. Some smart refinements on the formula — including features reminiscent of some of the best games in similar genres — make it a more approachable game without sacrificing its adrenaline-pumping nature.
A casual, cozy game this is not — and fans of Housemarque’s previous offerings wouldn’t have it any other way.
And while the story often eschews coherent plot points, it instead helps to subsume the player in a luxuriously eerie world that will leave you breathless, disoriented — and eager to dive into its horrors time and again.
WATCH | Saros launch trailer :
Shapeshifting shooter
Saros immediately throws players into the deep end. You take the role of Arjun, a heavily armed enforcer (think space cop and/or military contractor) working for the Earth mega-corporation Soltari.
Arjun’s part of a small group of humans sent to investigate the alien planet of Carcosa, after a handful of would-be expeditions meant to explore and colonize the resource-rich planet have gone missing in recent months.
Saros pulls heavily from two gaming genres, generally known as the roguelike (or an offshoot of it called roguelite, to be pedantic) and bullet hell.
The first was named as a tribute to 1980’s Rogue which codified a key format: you’ll start more or less from the beginning with each game (or “run”), defeating enemies and finding new weapons or upgrades to become powerful enough to continue.
Every time Arjun dies, he’s resurrected by an unknown power, and forced to venture out again, with the benefit of incremental knowledge about the threats facing him — but the layout and architecture of every level shuffles and changes each time you play.
By gathering lucenite — glittery bits strewn about the world like coins in Super Mario Bros. — you’ll be able to buy upgrades and become a little stronger every run, increasing your weapon’s power levels, maximum health and so on.
The bullet hell is historically a subgenre of top-down shooter games once popular in the arcades, with the player controlling a jet fighter or space ship. The most challenging versions force players to thread their tiny ship between a screen flooded with bullets and bombs, earning the moniker.
Following Returnal’s example, Saros brings the bullet hell idea into a 3D space. Housemarque prefers to call it “bullet ballet.”
Bio-mechanical flying squids, hulking demons and other inhuman enemies pump out brightly coloured bullets in concentric circles like a string of Christmas tree lights, or braids resembling DNA strands, as you return fire with your own rifles and pistols.
Saros’s main tool for dealing with enemy fire is the Soltari Shield, which can encase Ajrun in a bubble that absorbs blue (and only blue) bullets. Absorbing them charges his power weapon, essentially a high-powered shotgun or laser cannon that fires out of his hand and is critical for dispatching larger enemies.
It makes for a dangerous game of risk versus reward, as you charge forward to pick up blue bullets before your shield wears out, while avoiding other shots that will damage you no matter what.
Inevitably you’ll run into an obstacle you cannot pass — and the only way to pass is to take hold of a mass of writhing limbs growing out of the ground to activate the eclipse.
The seemingly supernatural phenomenon pulls the moon (or what seems to be a moon) in front of Carcosa’s blazing sun, transforming the world in strange ways.
Enemies are more numerous and hostile; once-dormant machinery whirs and groans with activity forming new hazards to traverse. It also increases the amount of lucenite currency found around the world, reinforcing the game’s theme of endangering yourself for material gain.
Killer atmosphere, but story takes back seat
Housemarque describes itself as a “gameplay first” studio. That’s exemplified by Saros, which spends far more of its time in the thick of combat and exploration, only stopping briefly to check in with the advancing narrative.
Arjun’s teammates make up a supporting cast that will be familiar to anyone who’s dabbled with science-fiction canon. There’s the hard-edged commander (Canadian Jane Perry, who played Returnal’s lead, Selene), the promising rookie, and a slimy corpo who’s basically a carbon copy of Paul Reiser’s character from Aliens.
Other than showing just how doomed every human is to Carcosa’s insidious influences, however — turning colonists against each other, as they start speaking gibberish about something called the yellow shore — they only appear briefly as you check in at home base in between runs, or even less often than that.
Arjun’s own story isn’t that intriguing — he’s searching for a woman named Nitya, who disappeared along with Soltari’s first colonists — though Kohli brings a sprinkling of nuance and empathy to a character who mostly grunts or yells at aliens and humans alike.
Players might be disappointed if they’re looking for encyclopedic lore about Soltari and Carcosa — or indeed a coherent plot. Saros leaves a lot to the imagination, to the point where you might go over a dozen hours without much understanding what’s going on or Arjun and others’ true motivations.
As long as you accept that, it doesn’t harm the experience much. If anything. it informs the feelings of loneliness and unease permeating the game, as you trek through alien landscapes and architecture pulled from Lovecraftian and gothic horror. Think impossibly tall cathedrals whose peaks scrape the sky, and marble reliefs of anguished humanoids with mangled limbs and sinew.
In Returnal and Saros, Housemaque has blended genres to create a duology of games unlike anything else out there. The latter has sanded off some of Returnal’s more unforgiving edges, without it feeling dumbed down or flattened out to win over an imagined mainstream audience.
It’s worth playing alongside other demon-slaying titles like Doom or Diablo while offering minute-to-minute action uniquely its own.
Saros launches April 30 for the Sony PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro.
