Is it ironic, or just a bit depressing, when a game about repetition finds itself trapped in its own set of loops? It’s one of the key questions raised by developer Housemarque’s new Lovecraft-in-neon sci-fi shooter Saros, which turns out to be just a little too reminiscent of the developer’s last Lovecraft-in-neon sci-fi shooter, Returnal.
That isn’t wholly a bad thing—The A.V. Club named Returnal the best game of 2021 for a reason. But it also suggests a developer more interested in small refinements than in bold movements; ironic for a game that takes, as one of its primary themes, the seductive, all-devouring power of ambition. Saros clearly isn’t subject to the same alien impulses that sends its cast of slightly stock sci-fi characters screaming into gotta-take-it-all madness after landing on an alien world; it’s less a descent into gleeful excess than a slow, comfortable shift into a second gear of sophomore coasting.
The game’s story—an original one, disconnected from Housemarque’s previous work—picks up not long after the arrival of space colonization ship Echelon IV on the hostile alien world of Carcosa, which is brimming with dangerous alien life, but also its own personal brand of Unobtainium in the form of a miracle mineral called Lucenite. As its name implies, Echelon IV isn’t the first attempt at human exploitation of Carcosa. In fact, it’s the ship of badass troubleshooters that gets sent in when the previous three colonization efforts go dark, amidst reports of something very bad happening on the planet any time it has one of its frequent, unpredictable eclipses. And, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not very long before those bad things start happening to the crew of the Echelon IV, too.
If this assemblage of space-horror tropes all sounds a little familiar, you’ve encountered one of the first serious issues with Saros, especially in its first half: Its paint-by-numbers approach to its cast and the story of spreading, otherworldly insanity they’re trapped within. Returnal got around some of these issues by putting a huge part of its focus on isolation, with star Jane Perry’s voice—spiraling ever-inward on itself—one of the only human sounds players were likely to hear for vast swathes of the game’s runtime. Saros doesn’t have the benefit of that kind of focus—or, it turns out, much of a knack for dialogue that involves two human beings actually talking to each other. You’ll spend your first several hours with it working your way laboriously through a list of character archetypes as they each go their own, highly predictable brand of mad.
That most especially includes player character Arjun Devraj, played with a minimum necessary dosage of charisma (and some fairly impressive motion capture) by Mike Flanagan regular Rahul Kohli. Without getting involved with spoilers, suffice it to say that Devraj has both his own reasons for coming to Carcosa, and his own individual avenues for the planet’s madness to infect and attack him—and, more to the point, that your first-thought inclination of what those issues might wind up being is probably going to be right on the money. Saros’ narrativegets significantly smarter in its second half, as it sharpens its satirical knives and does more with its literary inspirations than simply spray Robert Chambers references across a bunch of background posters and call it good. But even as it builds to a more interesting climax (roughly 25 hours in) it never manages to shake a basic sense of sci-fi predictability; the bullets might be shinier, and the monsters stranger, but you’ve seen some flavor of this story before.
If it feels, meanwhile, like we’re hammering comparisons to Housemarque’s earlier game, it’s because Saros never really lets you forget about Returnal. The game’s core run-and-shoot play is shockingly identical to the studio’s prior game, down to its biggest signature trick: Absolutely filling the screen with brightly lit projectiles in massive bullet hell-style patterns, daring the player to dash and weave between them while keeping up a steady rate of fire with their own evolving weapons. Saros tweaks this formula by granting a shield that will safely absorb some bullets in exchange for power—and, later, a parry that allows you to deflect others, based off a bit of ballistic color coding. It’s a hell of a magic trick, especially when you get to bosses who create gorgeous mosaics of death that come flying at Arjun’s head. But a magic trick repeated is never quite as thrilling, and the changes meant to ameliorate that familiarity here are tweaks, not evolutions—safe expansions clearly modeled on feedback from the earlier game, and not any kind of bold step forward.
The same can be said of the game’s wider exploration, which once again roughly falls into the rougelike template: Devraj, like Returnal’s Selene, has a mysterious gift for coming back from the dead, allowing players to navigate the game’s procedurally generated (and often punishingly difficult) landscapes over and over again, gleaning a bit more forward progress (and the occasional new audio log or exploration tool) every time. At some point in any level, you’ll be forced to activate Carcosa’s nigh-omnipresent eclipse, mutating the environment and making monsters (and their projectiles) more difficult to deal with, and some levels even give you control over when it comes. (Switching the world state over increases rewards and sometimes opens up new paths, so it can be worth it to trigger things early.) But the change itself is less drastic than its in-game hype might lead you to expect; it’s never great when “putting your hand into outstretched demon arms in order to send a planet blazing into darkness” starts to feel so rote that you find yourself jamming the “skip cutscene” button every time you trigger the effect.
The actual running-and-gunning, meanwhile, falls firmly into the “ain’t broke, don’t fix” bucket of iterative game design: Arjun, like Selene before him, moves fast as hell in a way that feels consistently great, while Housemarque remains the only developer in Sony’s stable that seems at all interested in doing cool things with the PlayStation 5’s adaptive triggers. (Half-pulling the left trigger engages an alt-fire mode, while a full pull switches over to Devraj’s superweapon; it’s more intuitive that it initially sounds.) The guns all have a solid feel to them, although, again, it’s very hard not to notice that they’re almost exactly the weapons from Returnal—pistol, rifle, shotgun, and a few slightly more esoteric tweaks—with slightly different skins. (We will note that one of the last guns you get, a disc launcher that embeds projectiles in enemies that you can then rev up to full speed from a distance, is almost ridiculously satisfying once you get the hang of it. Shorn of its deeper aspirations, Returnal was a fantastic dose of gaming action candy, and Saros doesn’t shirk those duties.)
If there’s one place that Housemarque’s slow-but-steady design philosophy pays off, meanwhile, it’s in Saros’ approach to difficulty. Players turned off by the rigidity of Returnal’s challenge curve (and its initial refusal to let players suspend a run without starting over from scratch) will find both problems have been addressed: You can now shut the game down whenever you want (outside of boss fights) and still find Arjun in the exact same corner of alien hell you left him in. A fairly robust tech tree lets you buy at least a few upgrades after each run, short-circuiting the feeling of having wasted an hour of your life when a boss fight turns to hell. And, while they’re not immediately available, the game swiftly adds in a series of modifiers you can apply to your runs, trading new weaknesses in for points that allow you to adjust what can initially feel like overtuned damage for you, and undertuned damage for your enemies. If we wanted to quibble, we’d note that this last system is probably a little too easy to game, at least in the form it’s arriving in at launch; at the same time, the game’s major battles put so much brightly glowing shit on the screen that anyone hoping to reach the end of its story will probably be grateful for the ability to turn some of that chaos down.
Saros is not a brave sequel. (And it is a sequel, by any reasonable definition of the word.) It’s a safe one: An attempt to improve on a stable core structure, shave off its more alienating edges, and make something more palatable for the masses. The result, then, is competent, successful, and disappointing in equal measure. Arriving at a time when the PS5 was desperately in need of a killer app, Returnal was a much-desired dose of shock and awe, a staggering blend of narrative bleakness and gameplay exhilaration. But now the shock has dissipated, and the awe has been spent. Saros is a more accessible game, in terms of both its play and its story, and there are merits to that approach. It’s a good game, genuinely. But it’s not a great one, and, worse, at no point while playing it do you get the sense that it wanted to be one; that great and terrible and beautiful hunger to be more that eats at, damns, and exults its characters never seems to touch its own heart. Which might be for the best! But it leaves the game stripped of anything you haven’t likely seen before—and as a follow-up to a game that frequently made the jaw drop, that’s its own little kind of hell.
Saros was developed by Housemarque and published by Sony. It’s available for PlayStation 5.
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