Saros releases this week, April 30, and it’s good. You can read my review right here. Ahead of its release, I spoke with Housemarque’s creative director, Gregory Louden, and art director, Simone Silvestri, about the game’s development, its cosmic-horror inspirations, Sony’s purchase of the studio following the release of Returnal, keeping narrative secrets, and much more.
Game Informer: How quickly did development on Saros begin after Returnal? What was that process?
Gregory Louden: Right after Returnal launched, there was a very small team, which was basically kind of the small group of Returnal directors, and we essentially started to think of the new game. But we also knew we wanted to continue to support Returnal, so there was the Tower of Sisyphus Returnal Ascension update. A lot of the Housquemarque team was working on this, sort of the pre-DLC we did for players that came out a year later. And then there was a small vision team that was beginning to work forward on what would be Saros.
From there, the game’s changed in many ways, but in other ways, it hasn’t, like some of the core goals. We knew after Returnal we wanted to explore permanent progression systems, so “come back stronger” was one of the initial kind of lines that we had Arjun say in a script, and it became like a vision statement for the entire game and even our tagline. We knew we wanted to add more characters and more viewpoints. We love the story of Selene and Returnal, but we wanted to add more viewpoints to cosmic horror. And last, but not least, a very early point was this idea of the eclipse and how it’s such a special cosmic event. It’s literally two celestial bodies that felt so ripe for cosmic horror. So it was a small team with big ideas that started to kind of build the game. And then after Returnal Ascension, the full Housemarque team joined in, and the result is Saros.
Sony purchased Housemarque after Returnal launched. Was it simply a matter of Sony loving Returnal so much that it wanted to lock you in and have more games like Returnal, and then it was off to the races?
Gregory Louden: Yeah, it’s been amazing. They basically, to your point, said, “We love Returnal. We love your identity. We think you’re doing something special.” I think [CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment] Hermen Hulst said, like, “Bring on the bullets.” So, he knew. From there, it was just about you building something really special, and we started talking about our ambitions and how we wanted to do something new, and we wanted Returnal to stand on its own, and PlayStation supported us. It’s been really, really amazing and such a fantastic opportunity for us, and a lot of support for this really bold, bold game that we’ve done, and us really wanting to kind of push the hardware and push the medium and push ourselves as a team. So, yeah, amazing support.
Saros is not a Returnal sequel, but they are intentionally mechanically very similar, which, you know, is intentional. Was there a temptation to try something completely new, or was there just excitement about reevaluating Returnal’s mechanics and expanding them?
Gregory Louden: I’d say there was excitement about wanting to re-examine them. We really loved what we made, but we also knew we wanted to push it and reshape it and elevate it and sort of twist it to a point. We had all these amazing lessons that we learned, and we wanted to keep pushing them and add new layers. And Returnal really resonated with a lot of people, so we knew we built something special. It was just about refinement, not reinvention. It was really that we’ve got something. Let’s keep expanding the formula and keep trying to build something really special. It was a very early decision to say let’s keep building, but let’s also add elements that change it. Have some reverence for the past, but also an ambition to be innovative and push for new things.
Returnal (2021)
Returnal and Saros have similar art direction. Is it hard to exist in this dark, oppressive world you have created? Does that hurt your brain and emotional state over the course of many years?
Simone Silvestri: I think it’s actually a very interesting place to be creatively. I love cosmic horror, and that’s something that we feed off a lot. And I think that there’s a reason why Lovecraft did Cthulu in the water, right? Because at the time, the ocean was so mysterious, and as humans, we keep asking questions out of the darkness. But now we have light everywhere, so the final darkness is the void, is the space, is the cosmic horror of the unknown, right? And to me, that’s that what stimulates me, that stimulates my curiosity a lot. I think that it resonates a lot with players as well, because you have this haunting mystery where to know is to be damned, but to not know is to be lost and you can feel that through this game, as well.
Actually, I was very happy when I got onboarded onto the project, and [Louden] talked to me about the eclipse as this cosmic force. There’s nothing bigger than actual cosmic bodies creating a cosmic horror. To me, that was just the perfect golden thread that I would want to follow throughout that direction. And that’s why we went into building something so extreme where there is an entire civilization dedicated to the worship of the celestial body, and it allowed us to go and draw upon a lot of history and mysticism for our civilization.
Then, from there, you always want to abstract yourself from that grounded aesthetic and start injecting things that are very different. We draw upon anime and comics and 80s sci-fi movies. And sometimes just an animated object on your desk becomes a shape language of some kind that you want to introduce. I think the thing that we love doing more the most is to bring contrast, so that you create this visual friction. And in that visual friction, you can find something very unique. We’re always out to do this cocktail to create a character out of the world, character out of the architecture, character out of the design of Arjun himself. And how do we describe our plan of cosmic order? And is it similar to the Returnal in the sense that we revere the atmosphere of that game. Returnal is a master class of atmosphere, so we wanted to make sure that we could preserve the atmosphere. But this game needed something different. It needed its own expression. It needed its own identity. And that was really an awesome journey to get together.
You mention cosmic horror, and there is, of course, weird fiction like The King in Yellow, which is specifically relevant to Saros. You also call out media like anime and comics. Are there other specific stories, characters, monsters, or elements of that larger Lovecraftian fiction that you looked to specifically for Saros, or maybe even specific elements of The King in Yellow?
Simone Silvestri: We can always go into specifics and find references, but usually it’s just for one piece of one element. And I think Robert W. Chambers with The King in Yellow was the main starting point. But visually speaking, it’s really about the blend. It’s really about finding more than one source and taking each piece that you want to express the feeling that you need. And for us, the golden thread has always been the narrative, and then the constraints of gameplay, and what do we need to do to facilitate gameplay with that.
Gregory Louden: Similarly, I’d say there was kind of an initial, sort of genesis point for us to go back to. The Lovecraft resource was really inspiring for us with Returnal, but we also wanted to do something new. So, everything was unique for Returnal, but then we wanted to find more cosmic horror, and Lovecraft was inspired by The King in Yellow, so it felt like a natural way to go deeper. And then, from there, there are connections in this game, but in the end, it was just a starting point, and everything else we’ve tried to create has been a brand-new science fiction world. All of our overlords, the bosses you meet, the meanings, the Echelon crews, it’s us trying to create this really exciting new dark sci-fi world. We love dark sci-fi on our team. We love all the greats and we aspire to try to create something really special for players to get lost in that feels familiar, but also new and different, and ideally, to them, feels really bold. They haven’t ideally played a game like this.
Across Returnal and Saros, there are themes of madness and incomprehension of vast forces and obsession. Why is Housemarque attracted to that? Is there something larger to be said there about making a video game and becoming obsessed with making a video game? Or am I reading too much into it?
Gregory Louden: It comes from a place, with both Returnal and Saros, where we wanted to explore, like universal human themes and really try to push the medium in a way. It was a big discussion we had in Returnal that we have a responsibility where we’re working on the next generation of PlayStation consoles. What can we do to help push the medium and have new types of gameplay, have new types of stories? For us, we wanted to explore… Saros is, in a lot of ways, about obsession. It’s about greed. It’s about power. It’s about corruption. We wanted to explore these grand themes and explore them through our gameplay, explore them through our story, through our art, through our sound, through our music. I think it was just a grander aspiration of wanting to do something different and like show new ways to kind of examine different concepts, so I think it came from there. And once again, it’s the lens of dark science fiction that lends you towards these types of ideas and concepts. I think that’s why you’re seeing this. It’s us aspiring to explore bigger ideas through our gameplay and through our story and through our worlds.
Returnal. Saros. Separate games, obviously. Different characters, different planets, different circumstances… but do they exist within the same universe?
Gregory Louden: This is something that we prefer the players to figure out rather than we answer.
Where is the line between laying it all out and telling you what’s going on and not telling you at all? What is the value of not stating narrative details directly?
Gregory Louden: I’d say the value in a lot of ways, and it is a fine line for us, but our goal is to create something that’s mysterious and haunting. The stuff that’s really inspired us as a team is it almost feels like… how was this made? It almost feels like this special thing, even though it’s just made by a team that’s working together on something. But I think in the end, we’re doing it because we want to create a really deep and personal experience for players, where everyone who plays Saros or Returnal will have their own experience. The world shifts. You get the story in different ways. You get different meanings. Everyone comes to these games with different ideas and experiences, and the game challenges you. The same way the gameplay challenges you, the story does, too. The thing that we loved about Returnal, and we aspire to with Saros, is everyone will come out of it with different ideas and different thoughts and different meanings. We do it so it’s not just one answer. There are many answers, and there’s something beautiful in that, then everyone can have their own experience with something, and can take something away from it.
Do you want to do DLC? Do you want to do expansions for Saros like you did Returnal?
Gregory Louden: We’re only talking about Saros for launch day.
[Editor’s note: Below is a minor mechanical gameplay spoiler I wish I had known before playing, but I decided to spoiler-gate it in case you wanted to avoid this small detail.]
The tombstone-shaped chests where you get new items and new guns: you can either press triangle to open them, or you can punch them open. Do you get different items depending on how you open them?
Simone Silvestri: That’s one of the joys of gameplay-first games, because this is one of those moments in which there is synergy between art and gameplay. I made the design of the chest together with our associate art director, [Ilmari Kumpunen] and we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if it was this sort of like weird crystal formation?” And when we put it into the game and the first thing that designers did was say, “Oh, we need to break this. We need to punch this immediately. This is how you’re going to open the chest. You’re going to punch them.” And the reason was because we don’t want to have any animation time when you open a chest. Otherwise, we slow you down. We get you out of the flow. No, you need to be able to jump dash, break the chest, press triangle, get the item. Keep going, stay in the flow, right? So that’s very intentional, that it’s so fast. It was awesome to see them go, “Oh, that looks breakable. We’re just gonna enable you to punch it.” And I love when that happens because there are very few examples of this throughout the game that are this perfect thought synergy. We didn’t set out to make it like that. It’s just happened because they wanted to break it. And for us, it was like, “Yeah, that’s why it looks like a crystal.”
But should I press triangle to open it? Or punch it? Do the different actions lead to different outcomes?
Simone Silvestri: Oh, yeah. It’s the same thing. It’s just you get to discover a different interaction for it that makes you go faster.
In a way, maybe accidentally, sometimes, at least initially, it made me go slower, because I would stop in front of it and be like, “Wait, should I punch this? Or should I press triangle?”
Gregory Louden: It was very intentional that it’s Arjun punching. He punches through these.
Oh, yeah, it feels good. I usually punch them.
Gregory Louden: [laughs] Good for you.
Could you define the difference between a roguelike with a ‘K’ and a roguelite with a ‘T’? It’s a question I like to ask rogue developers to learn where they land on it. And also, what is Saros?
Gregory Louden: I’d say, in a lot of ways, it’s just been a starting point for us, and I feel like for us as a team, it’s a style of game. We feel like we’re creating something different in a lot of ways. If you want to play something like Saros, the only other game like it is Returnal in terms of the gameplay, the story, the atmosphere, the style. There are elements of the shape-shifting and the change, but it feels like we’re creating something different. I love the genre and love the style, but it’s not something that we’re beholden to. We’re almost trying to push through and create something different.
But to your other point, I think it’s complicated, the -like or -lite. It’s tricky. I feel like I’m probably going to get it wrong, because there’s such specificity, and people are so into it. But I think in a lot of ways, I usually just say rogue that it has rogue elements, rather than saying it has other things. Because in a lot of ways, we do stuff that isn’t true to the original Rogue and it’s when we do that that we’re a roguelite. But in the end it’s not something we really use to describe the game, at least from my side.
Simone Silvestri: To be honest with you, the difference is very ephemeral to me. We very rarely talk about Saros as a rogue game, because we have so many elements that are not that, and we are not trying to go into a genre intentionally. It’s just, “What fits replayability? Oh, these kind of things.” What surprises the player when you get back out into the world and it has shifted. Why do we do that? Because we want you to play something different every time, but also because we want to have a moment of tension for the player, where you don’t recognize your surroundings, right? And the cycle of death and rebirth is interesting thematically and it brings something to the creative endeavor that a linear campaign maybe cannot do.
That’s kind of the sphere that we’re interested into. But it’s more than, “We need to make a rogue game.” It’s just that some of those mechanics are actually a very good fit for our second-to-second action gameplay, for our minute-to-minute power progression and our hour-to-hour psychological narrative. They just fit together really well. But it’s hard for me to categorize Saros in any of these, because it’s sort of trying to do its own thing, and we didn’t set out to be in a genre or defy a genre. It just happened organically as we were trying to make the best game possible.
But yeah, the difference between the two, to me, is very difficult to articulate, to be honest.
I love that within the genre – the loop – how Saros contextualizes it and makes it part of the story. I love that element and I imagine that it was something early on that you wanted to craft a story around being a video game as Saros is. Is that a fair assumption?
Gregory Louden: Yeah, definitely it was. It was something that with Returnal, it was a core thing, and it was important to us with Saros that we have that as well. The eclipse remakes the world, and there’s the mystery of how Arjun is remade as well. So, yeah, yeah.
Do you have any Saros tips for new players?
Gregory Louden: I’d say the big thing is that projectiles are not obstacles. They’re opportunities. So run into the projectiles. Collect them. Another quick tip: collect the Lucenite. It’s what Soltari has come to Carcosa for, and it’s how you’ll grow Arjun and how you’ll get him to the end. So really, run towards the projectiles. Run towards the Lucenite. Collect it. That’s a really big survival tip.
Simone Silvestri: That’s the biggest one, right? Learn to dance within the combat so that you can be comfortable in the eye of the storm, because that’s where the game is at its absolute best. The next thing I would say… just be curious. There’s so much depth in the gameplay systems, in the narrative that we built into the world, and in the building of the world. I think we are rewarding curiosity with very, very interesting elements. So that’s definitely number two on the list.
I like that tip because I was initially scared to counter the red projectiles. I was pretty late in the game when I finally started doing that. I just wanted to thank you for making that parry window actually pretty generous. That’s the tip I am going to offer new players: don’t be scared to parry the red projectiles.
Gregory Louden: You’re welcome. It’s important.
Any recent rogue games that you’ve enjoyed?
Simone Silvestri: Hades II has been, for me, really, really good. I really, really enjoy Supergiant Games, so that’s just an awesome rogue game. And for me, one of the standards of that particular genre.
Gregory Louden: I would give a shout-out to Hades II, as well. Wonderful game. Love Balatro. That’s the thing with the rogue genre. It’s so vast. Special games, both of them.
I asked Louden and Silvestri and few questions about the game’s ending, but will save those for the future. Check back on May 8 and I will add the spoiler questions to the end of this interview.