There is a progression of perspective in the best-designed roguelites. The exciting confusion of the opening moments, when everything is foreign to you; when your hands feel broken as you hold the controller while reading a UI that may as well have been written by aliens. And the elation of completing a run, when a once indecipherable language of on-screen notifications and gameplay becomes native, and you have become an expert. Good roguelites understand this – the great ones use this, creating a consonance within the cacophony. Returnal’s Selene struggles as much as you in your first run. Zagreus is as emphatically excited as you when he first escapes Hades. And now, Arjun, the player-controlled protagonist of Saros, joins this echelon… at least, I think he will after playing developer Housemarque’s upcoming roguelite for three hours earlier this month.
Arjun awakens on the ancient, but high-tech planet of Carcosa, confused but determined. He straps a necklace weighed down by an amulet bearing a foreign sun, picks up his pistol, and ardently charges toward a voice begging for him. I want to know who she is – Arjun already knows, but he wants to find her, and so we both begin a journey through this burnt planet.
As Arjun struggles to piece together where he is and what these destructive machines are (and why they’re firing at him), so, too, do I. It’s one of the best moments of my time playing Saros. Together, we try to learn a new language: the language of survival, of movement, of oil-ridden murder.
The action is brand new for Arjun, and actor-gamer Rahul Kohli sells an excellent blend of disbelief and impassioned determination for this character I control. However, it’s not entirely new to me, as I speak a similar language. I played Returnal.
In Returnal, Selene dashed through lines of explosive orbs, jumping when she must, and shooting through it all. In Saros, Arjun does the same, though it’s a dance here. Arjun wants to kill; he wants to reach the end to find her, whoever she is. Selene just wanted to survive. The most exciting difference in Saros is that dance, and I’m not surprised to hear Housemarque rebuke calling this game a “bullet hell,” opting instead for “bullet ballet.” Based on my playtime, the difference between hell and ballet is hegemony. Selene was constantly on the back foot throughout Returnal. Arjun is the opposite, and Housemarque’s kit for him demonstrates that.
Arjun jumps, long jumps, dashes, long dashes, and most importantly, uses a special shield that not only deflects damage but absorbs it, morphing it into Power that he can use to deal devastating damage to anyone in his way. This drastically changes the relationship between our protagonist this time around and the returning arcade-style cascade of bullets. I’m not interested in dodging them – I want to go straight through them, and Arjun’s shield is the vehicle for that. It’s a familiar defensive mechanic (arguably the most familiar in all of games), but this small change flips this studio’s excellent roguelite formula on its head. I now crave those blue orbs and orange lasers. I die a few times while attempting to learn the language of Saros, but I soon find the confidence/cockiness I took three times longer to discover in Returnal. I save up my Power Weapon, a special move that requires the Power (i.e., energy) only your shield can gather to defeat the boss known as Bastion, a massive mechanical hive-mind in the game’s second biome, itself a sprawling network of pipes, wires, and metal.
Right on cue, this is the other best moment of my time playing Saros.
But trust that everything between the opening moment and this victory isn’t throwaway. I witness other ways Housemarque has learned and evolved from Returnal. You can suspend a run (the biggest boon for parents like me); your progression between runs is more apparent and more immediate, with bountiful upgrades to work through by spending the Lucenite you collect on Carcosa; there’s an ensemble cast, adding some warmth to this otherwise alien planet; and there’s teleportation and shortcuts, making it easy to get to exactly where you want to go, though I suspect the most hardcore of roguelite enjoyers will loudly admonish these locomotive efforts. In other words, every issue I wanted changed in Returnal seems to have been addressed in Saros.
With little time to go before Saros is out, I find myself anxious to return to Carcosa, where harmonies of metals, technology, and extraterrestrial melodies drone over the action Arjun orchestrates with gun in hand. His desperation to find the woman whispering in his ear matches mine. Though we have different reasons, we both intend to reach an end, and I can’t wait to see what awaits us there.
While waiting for Saros to launch exclusively on PlayStation 5 on April 30, read Game Informer’s Returnal review, and then check out this Saros gameplay trailer. After that, read about how Saros will let you teleport straight to unlocked biomes.
Are you excited for Saros? Ask me any questions you might have about it in the comments below and I’ll answer what I can!