Saros is pure action nirvana

The alien world of Saros feels like it has been touched by King Midas. The sky is golden after another impossibly frequent solar eclipse; rocks, specifically those of the precious resource Lucenite, radiate a shimmering amber. Even the body of our gruff hero Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli) is liable to turn deep, opulent yellow as he ventures further into the wilds of Carcosa. Should he die (a regular occurrence), the game cuts to stranger, more cryptic images, one of which is a double bed covered in gold silk sheets.

It’s a fittingly blingy aesthetic for this time when gaming has scarcely been a more gilded activity (seriously, have you seen how much a PlayStation 5 costs these days?). Yet this incidental resonance aside, the resplendent gold-tinted presentation speaks to a game where every frame feels ablaze with magnificent light. Saros is, among other things, a third-person bullet-hell shooter. This means that it is often throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of slow- and fast-moving projectiles toward you at any single moment. Some of these projectiles are golden; others are red and blue; all of them illuminate cavernous 3D arenas while you unload your own supernatural bullets into the ether. The result is mesmerizing, a kind of divinely spectacular fireworks display.

If the experience of playing Saros, the new PS5 exclusive from Finnish studio Housemarque, is frequently transcendent, its sci-fi wrapper keeps the action grounded. Arjun is part of a rescue mission sent to the barren yet mineral-rich planet of Carcosa, charged with investigating an imperiled human colony. But the protagonist immediately gets stuck in a time loop, just as Selene did in Housemarque’s excellent previous game, Returnal. At various points, he is able to trigger eclipses that cause the world to both darken and become many magnitudes more deadly, filling up with writhing entities that strike a perfectly unsettling balance between organic and machinic, much like the steel monsters in The Matrix.

The mashup of influences is familiar, yet carefully assembled in a way that makes Saros feel fresh: The supersized, bio-synthetic architecture is clearly influenced by H.R. Giger; the talk of Ancients evokes Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Every gigantic portal made me think of Stargate; the cosmic dread is pure Event Horizon. In the terror of the game’s standout visual leitmotif, a huge burning sun, Housemarque summons Danny Boyle’s underrated Sunshine.

The infernal ambience is compounded by how Saros sounds: the belching bogs of Blighted Marsh; the whirring, gurning noises of machinery; Sam Slater’s massive, amped-up-to-11 soundtrack that segues seamlessly between doom metal and blaring club music, striking a kind of hellish harmony with the groans of the beasts Arjun has awoken from their slumber.

There have been many moments while playing Saros when I’ve said quietly to myself, “fucking awesome.” That happened a few nights ago, but in order to explain what was special about that session, I need to actually explain the structure of the game.

Saros, like Returnal, is a roguelite, meaning that it possesses a slightly less punishing run-based structure than Rogue-descending siblings such as Spelunky and Rogue Legacy. That’s not to say Saros isn’t hard — it can be. But the challenge is offset a little by the generous permanent upgrades purchased between runs, bolstering either your health, firepower, or ability to hoover up resources.

Over the first 10 hours of Saros, I died maybe 25 times making my way from a stunning mountain region to a gigantic citadel. Along the way, I discovered the joys of arm-length handguns with ricocheting bullets and space-age crossbows that fire bolts of raw energy. The game is split into various areas, but you’re able to teleport back to any one of them once you reach it, thus starting Arjun slightly further along his journey each time.

Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment

The other night, I decided to start a run in the very first area. With my plethora of enhancements, I tore through early-game foes, barely taking a hit. Regardless of your meta-progression, Arjun moves with liquid-mercury smoothness and impossible speed. Dashes essentially make you invincible for a split second. Picking up new and more powerful weapons, I blasted through bosses that had previously stumped me for hours. As the run went on for longer, I became exponentially more powerful: Arjun, maker of eclipses and wielder of alien technology, started to feel like a god. When it came to the boss I had yet to best, an ominous floating eye surrounded by wraith-like orbs, I took it down with ease, supercharged from the cumulative exploits of the total session.

I’m not typically good at such dexterously demanding games. But Saros gives even a player like me ways to progress. I typically lean on weapons with forgiving auto-aim, such as the Smart Rifle, whose red spectral bullets curve elegantly toward the game’s many Lovecraftian enemies. One power-up sees Arjun unloading what look like mini eclipses, dealing fatal damage to anything that veers near it.

Over the past 30 years, Housemarque has garnered a well-earned reputation for punishing bullet-hell shooters (see also Nex Machina and Resogun). Yet with Saros, you can feel the studio, now owned by Sony, wrestling with a conundrum: how to make the genre more accessible without diluting its essential, thumb-punishing essence.

The game largely nails this balance, though its most arresting moments remain the deadliest. I’ve had battles with hordes of foes who seem to occupy every inch of space from the floor to the sky, raining down polyrhythmic volleys of orbs. If Arjun stands still, he is toast, so you keep him moving — bobbing and weaving, ducking and diving through spirograph-like configurations of immaterial light to find the constantly repositioning pockets of safety.

Arjun has his own reasons for pressing forward with such bloody-minded intent: namely, a lost romantic partner on Carcosa. Yet this narrative thread inevitably fades during all the psychedelic shootouts. By the end, I saw him less as a person than as a kind of phosphorus energy force. Arjun, and by extension the player, is the catalyst for a game whose kaleidoscopic chain reactions are as beautiful as they are brutal. He is the match that sets this world afire.

Saros launches on the PS5 on April 30th.

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• Lewis Gordon
• Entertainment
• Games Review
• Gaming
• PlayStation