Your first challenge in Saros, before it throws 20-plus hours of frenetic combat and nightmarish enemies at you, doesn’t involve any fighting. All you have to do is stop gawking at the view.
I have one particular piece of scenery in mind: a gigantic, swirling eclipse in the sky, which seems to be sucking everything in.
There is something dangerously hypnotic about it, something that inspires a mix of awe and dread. Let your camera linger on the eclipse and, after a moment, it will zoom in closer and closer, the black orb filling your screen, as though you’re being pulled in too.
It’s a decent metaphor for what Saros is trying to do to you, the player, dragging you ever, irresistibly deeper into what art director Simone Silvestri calls a “cocktail of cosmic horror, twisted enlightenment and violent beauty”.
“I hope players enjoy a game that is there to challenge them on every level. You know, a skill level, but also a narrative and psychological level, and an artistic level,” he tells news.com.au.
Like its predecessor Returnal, this game is much more than a vehicle for buttery smooth combat. Every element of it – the story, the world design, the art style, even little touches like your camera zooming in on the eclipse – it’s all doing something interesting.
“We love cosmic horror. We love psychological thrillers. So we do have these aspects of it,” says creative director Gregory Louden.
“But in the end, I’d say our aspiration with this game was to again give you a world and characters to examine and study, and from that, to kind of make up your own mind of what this game is, and what it isn’t.
“We wanted to haunt you, and create a true sense of mystery.”
It’s always fascinating with a game like this, whose every pore oozes creativity, to poke at what the people behind it were trying to do.
In this case the developer, Housemarque, was seeking to follow up 2021’s Returnal with “refinement, not reinvention”.
That’s why the moment-to-moment gameplay looks similar, at first glance, but feels quite different when the controller is in your hand.
Mr Louden frames it as a question of “avoidance” versus “interaction”.
As your screen filled up with dangerous beams and orbs in Returnal – the “bullet hell” style of gameplay Housemarque specialises in – your only option was to dodge them. In Saros, you can instead absorb some of these attacks with your shield, which charges your powerful secondary weapon.
That one mechanic transforms the flow of combat.
“In Returnal, you’re constantly dodging the projectiles. But in Saros you collect them, you use them. So every projectile type actually becomes an opportunity,” Mr Louden says.
“There’s all these layers of opportunity for players. It’s not just using projectiles for damage like many games. We’re actually using them as chances.
“That’s been a full change. And we used to say bullet hell, but now we actually say ‘bullet ballet’, because you’re dancing, you’re using, you’re moving between the projectiles. So I’d say that’s the big evolution.”
The other evolution is in how the game handles difficulty.
Saros isn’t easy, but it is designed to be less punishing than its predecessor. If you were struggling in Returnal, it could feel as though you were making no progress at all. In Saros even your deaths are meant to feel productive; the goal is a sense of steady progress.
“We all loved Returnal, and some players loved it as well, but they couldn’t confront the friction we had,” Mr Louden concedes.
“So an early vision statement was ‘come back stronger’. We wanted to allow even more players to approach Saros, and get into it, and get lost in the game.
“We wanted to allow more players to confront the friction and then own it, and love the game. And ideally, after playing Saros, go back through 30 years of Housemarque history, and enjoy Returnal next.”
The difficulty is revamped in a few ways.
First is the “armour matrix”, which is essentially a basic skill tree. Each time you die and return to home base, you can unlock a few more permanent upgrades. Most of them increase protagonist Arjun Devraj’s stats by small increments, which add up over time.
“We do want to challenge you,” Mr Louden stressed.
“You will die, and that’s OK. Death is just the beginning. That’s how you upgrade yourself.
“It was always the key thing: we wanted Saros to be more motivating and more rewarding, to really pull you forward, so you don’t feel like all is lost. You feel like, ‘I’ll get you this time.’ So you can keep pushing.
“Not diluting the Returnal experience, instead providing another avenue to confront it.”
Another new feature is the modifier system, which becomes available a relatively short distance into the game, and lets you choose from a menu of ways to make it either easier or harder.
Say you feel as though the enemies are too spongy. To compensate, you could activate a modifier that makes your weapons do slightly more damage.
But at the same time, say you’re finding the game’s “corruption” mechanic, through which some projectiles reduce your maximum health, a bit toothless. You could activate a negative modifier to make its effects more severe.
You can mix and match different options however you like, as long as the overall difficulty level doesn’t fall too low.
“They adjust the challenge to be what players want it to be, so that way they can overcome it as they see fit,” says Mr Louden.
“We wanted to create lots of different options for players.”
“It’s about player agency, right? You have a challenge in front of you, and you have many ways to try to overcome it,” Mr Silvestri adds.
One more evolution worth mentioning is Housemarque’s approach to world design. Where Returnal featured half a dozen distinct biomes, Saros seeks to tie all its locations together.
“You know, Atropos (Returnal’s setting) is very segmented and divided. Each level has its own sort of story and identity. But for Carcosa (the planet where Saros takes place), we really wanted to make this world a character itself,” Mr Silvestri says.
“We wanted to do a lot more environmental story building. And we wanted to really design the civilisation that is there, really take care of the details. You can get a lot of narrative depth just by looking at the environment.
“And setting this journey so that you have this wider world, that you actually see the landmarks, and you move through them. That’s also a piece of storytelling in itself, because these are fixed locations. And to me, that was a really awesome thing to evolve on.”
The style of the world sprang from a mix of real-world inspirations.
“We draw from a lot of references,” he says.
“I think when we started talking with Greg and he pitched me the game and then the eclipse, I was immediately in love with this idea of the worship of the eclipse. So we started looking at the history of civilisations, mysticism, folklore.
“But then you got to abstract yourself a couple of layers and start injecting different references in there. So we looked at anime, we look at comic books, we look at 80s sci-fi movies.
“And slowly this soup of things, we cooked it more and more until it distilled itself into a unique identity.
“For example, for the architecture, we started from neoclassicism, because that’s sort of the worship of gods. That was born from Greek mythology. And we tried it on and it just wasn’t working because it’s too safe.
“So we took something that is the opposite of that, which is Italian futurism, then just got it all together. And it sort of started taking its own alien look, but an alien look that is unique to Carcosa.
“Sometimes I get asked was it this reference or this reference? And it’s like, yes, but no. It becomes its own cocktail of cosmic horror, twisted enlightenment and violent beauty.”
Saros is available on PS5. You can read our review here.
