Saros Review - Navigating The Fine Line Between Pleasure And Pain
After the Returnal experience, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever feel comfortable returning to another Housemarque title. Returnal was superb, one of the best games of the year, but it was also a game that I associated with an immense level of gaming frustration and anger. I wasn’t a good person to be around for a few weeks when I was playing Returnal, my wife can probably attest to that, but the sweet relief that I experienced when all the stars aligned, I got the drops that I needed and I powered through to the end of the game triggered a feeling of jubilation that I’ve not experienced before or since. This whole experience left me hesitant towards Saros, that is, until I recently had the opportunity to travel to PlayStation and try the game out myself. Suddenly, my tone had changed, and I was sure that the perfect balance of brutal difficulty and accessibility had been reached. Having now successfully played through Saros, without nearly the same level of stress and anguish in my life, I can double down on my previous statements – Housemarque nailed it.
Saros’ plot and the way it is delivered might be one of the more disputed elements of this title. The game’s story follows Arjun Devraj, an Enforcer for Echelon IV, the (surprise) fourth group to land on the plains of Carcosa, a planet being plundered for its immense (and very valuable) levels of Lucenite. Previous expeditions haven’t quite worked out though, with the various members of each party mysteriously vanishing, and communications going dark. As an Enforcer, it is Arjun’s job to uncover the mystery behind their disappearances, but he also has his own motivations, often being caught following a mysterious voice that taunts and teases him as he explores Carcosa.
The planet of Carcosa is just as major a character in Saros as the core cast. Carcosa is testing the mettle of those who’ve landed there, pushing many over the edge of insanity, while others have disappeared entirely. As Arjun pushes deeper into the wilds of Carcosa, he will gradually uncover the mystery of the planet, including the world-altering effects of an easily triggered solar eclipse, the taunting voice, and the fates of prior Echelon expeditions. While the plot is an excellent one, and I was left asking fresh questions constantly, it was the delivery of the plot that could’ve been a little more direct. While the game does have some great cutscenes, the conversations that Arjun has with his party are valuable, and even the environmental storytelling is pretty profound, too much is left to voice logs of hand-written notes to flesh out the plot. Housemarque has compiled a fascinating plot, but they’ve made it a bit too much effort for the player to extract the fullest amount from it. Given the high-stakes gameplay, the team has made it a bit too easy to miss the story altogether, in favour of maintaining gameplay momentum. I would have loved a few more extended scenes, where the team could have been a bit more direct in its storytelling, because sadly, I think too few will absorb the fullness of a wildly engaging story.
That said, if you’re all-in on the gameplay, you’re in for one hell of an experience. At its core, Saros’ shared DNA with Returnal is profoundly apparent to all who’ve played the 2021 title. Third person, running and gunning, and explosions of primary colours as waves of enemies fire all manner of arcade-inspired projectiles at you. If you played Returnal, you already understand the basics, but this wasn’t always the most accessible for players, and so, where Returnal chewed up and spat out many hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of players, Saros has a gentler, more supportive hand that it offers you to assist you on your way.
After each run (or cycle as its referred to as in Saros), the player will return to the ‘Passage’ the home base for the Echelon crew, and it is there where the player can spend the hard-earned Lucenite that they’ve accrued in the game’s ‘Armour Matrix’, its levelling up tree that will allow the player to invest in permanent improvements to their health (Resilience), strength (Command), and your Lucenite pick up rate (Drive). The Armour Matrix also has some key unlocks along the way, like the ‘Second Chance’ perk, which instantly revives the player one time if they fall in combat; further upgrades can go into this power to increase the amount of health that the player revives with. This progression system doesn’t guarantee success to the less-able player, but gives you a bif of an edge as you quest for survival. These are mild improvements, but not game changers, and the Armour Matrix contains a few bottlenecks in it that can only be overcome by besting a specific overlord boss.
Where the game really makes itself far more accessible to less proficient players is through the Carcosian Modifiers system. Carcosian Modifiers are a range of additional ‘Protections’ and ‘Trials’ that the player can enable to alter the game’s difficulty. You could enable a range of ‘Protections’ to boost your damage output, or your damage resistance, and there are a range of others that serve as buffs, but you can also turn on a range of ‘Trials’ to balance the experience, or even make it harder again. For standard use of this system, you must keep the scale of the Carcosian Modifier in the ‘Balanced section’, but if you need an easier ride, by toggling a single setting, you can turn on a huge number of Protections to make the gameplay significantly easier. Pair these with the improvements that you may have unlocked via the Armour Matrix, and suddenly, Saros can become a breeze. These options do fly in the face of what Housemarque have intended in their game design. Strangely, players must progress beyond the second boss of the game before the Carcosian Modifiers become available to you, making the ability to ease the game’s difficulty locked behind significant early challenges. Still, for those looking to get into a game that may have been otherwise too brutal for them, it’s a really nice addition.
The gameplay experience is an exceptional one, and is infinitely more accessible than Returnal, but just like Returnal, Saros is likely to catch your eye with its razor-sharp visuals. The bursts of primary colour only punctuate what is already a stunning game. The environments, the various mechanical and biological threats, and the characters found within the game are wonderfully detailed, while the impact of the eclipse transforms many of the game’s environments into Lovecraftian nightmares. When you run the game on a base PS5, it looks great, but the PS5 Pro version, utilising every bit of additional horsepower and the wizardry of PSSR, all on a 4K television, takes the visual experience up many more gears. The level of detail has to be seen to be believed. Meanwhile, the game’s soundtrack underpins the tense, high-stakes gameplay, and gets the adrenaline pumping with some backing tracks that would surely get the tick of approval from DOOM and DOOM Eternal composer, Mick Gordon, the bass, and distorted, synthetic sounds, causing the blood to pump harder than most games will ever extract from a player.
Saros is not the perfect game, but it is a significant refinement of an already excellent concept established in Returnal. There are opportunities for Housemarque to double down on its mode of storytelling, and the decision to gate the Carosian Modifiers behind a progression wall is hard to reckon with; but you will spend your entire game time with Saros feeling one of three things, deep satisfaction and motivation to push on, immense frustration at a failed run, paired with a motivation to push on, or steely determination as you continue to push on. Spend no more than 30 minutes with Saros, and it will have you in its grasp, and before you know it, you’ll be unable to stop thinking about it.
Saros was reviewed on PS5 with a code kindly provided by PlayStation Australia.
