Arjun Devraj is fighting the kind of war that isn’t typically won with brute force. The tortured star of Saros, the latest sci-fi shooting odyssey from Returnal developer Housemarque, finds himself locked in a hellish cycle, fighting hostile creatures and rogue robots on a planet where madness is easier to contract than a sunburn. It doesn’t matter how many times Devraj fails to survive a day — because he will fail. It’s as inevitable as the heat death of the universe. All that matters is what happens when he rises from the ashes.
The cycle of failure and redemption is part of the undeniable allure of the roguelike, something Saros struggles to pin down in its visually dazzling iteration of the format. A great roguelike creates empowerment through perseverance and iteration; it’s the very human experience of screwing up and trying to do a little better the next day. That’s a feeling Devraj knows all too well, which should make the format a harmonious fit for the brooding story beneath Saros’ hard sci-fi exterior. But with an overtuned emphasis on progression over skill or experimentation, Saros gives players too many opportunities to reduce Devraj’s personal journey to a numbers game.
Set on Carcosa, an alien world plagued by eclipses that drive creatures to madness, Saros revolves around Soltari, an enormous tech company that seeks to colonize the planet to gain access to its valuable natural resource, Lucenite. After the crew members of an expedition go radio silent, Soltari sends in a rescue party of enforcers to figure out what happened. That crew includes Devraj, portrayed by Midnight Mass star Rahul Kohli, who is invested in finding one person in particular. Thus kicks off a mystery that tasks Devraj with fighting through sun-soaked biomes and trying to survive the planet’s waves of aggravated monsters and killer machines.
Though Saros is in no way related to Returnal, it may as well be a spiritual sequel that swaps its blue color palette for yellow. Housemarque takes everything it learned making its breakthrough PlayStation 5 game and repeats the same beats with minimal variations. It’s still a frenetic third-person shooter where you have to dance around walls of colorful energy balls that will shred your health if you don’t learn how to dodge them. It still centers around a cryptic sci-fi story hiding a more personal journey that recontextualizes what you’re seeing on an alien planet as a menacing metaphor. There’s still a shotgun that shoots vertically or horizontally, depending on how hard you press the DualSense trigger. To use a roguelike analogy, it’s like piecing together a run-winning build and trying to replicate it on your next go-around, swapping out a few relics here and there in the name of optimization.
That iterative approach to design both works for and against Saros. On the story side, Housemarque struggles to elevate a wooden sci-fi drama despite having some promising pieces to play with. Kohli is a strong anchor, teasing out Devraj’s hidden pain through tightly clenched teeth. You always feel like he’s holding something back, and the draw of the mystery is discovering what exactly he’s fighting so hard to lock away as Carcosa tries to drag his worst side out of him. What happens to a person’s mind when all light leaves their life, and they’re left trapped in shadow? Kohli brings that anxiety to life through slow-simmering rage.
Structurally, it’s not so dissimilar from the story of Returnal, but Saros doesn’t pull off the same trick twice. Returnal works as well as it does because its astronaut hero, Selene, is fighting a childhood trauma more so than fighting aliens. The roguelike structure is a reflection of her mental state; she’s literally reliving a traumatic event over and over. Devraj’s story, awash in literary references and Hindu symbolism, isn’t as clean of a fit despite cleverly drawing on saṃsāra to justify a roguelike’s inherent resurrection cycle. With the metaphorical mystery missing that same intrigue until very late in the game, much of the narrative heavy lifting falls on a run-of-the-mill sci-fi story filled with stock side characters that don’t leave much impact during dull chats back at the crew’s home base.
The action, which also skews very close to Returnal’s playbook, fares much better. Housemarque once again proves that it knows how to make an incredibly fierce and tactile shooter that takes full advantage of the PS5’s hardware. There’s a wide variety of weapons to toy around with, from shotguns to charging crossbows, and there are multiple variants of each to discover. There’s a thrill to picking up a new weapon and pulling the trigger for the first time to watch how efficiently it can shred an alien. That’s all enhanced by Housemarque’s commitment to Sony’s unique DualSense controller. Once again, you can trigger special shots depending on how hard you press the adaptive triggers down, and the haptic feedback makes you feel the force of each shot in a way few shooters do. Aside from Team Asobi, Housemarque may be the only other studio that actually gets the DualSense and what it’s capable of.
In general, Saros feels like it was commissioned as a mid-to-late generation PS5 showpiece — Sony’s version of Xbox Games Studios’ Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. Not only does it remind players of how developers have broadly undervalued the console’s controller, but it goes all in on the kind of visual spectacle the PS5 can support. Every battle, from your average arena shootout to boss fights against sinewy monsters, is a breathtaking fireworks display of particles. The numerous biomes of Carcosa are always exciting to discover thanks to detailed design accentuated by the kind of harsh lighting you want in a story built around the sun. Whether you’re trekking through a dehydrated plain littered with blood-red growth or an underground factory that looks like the inside of an engine, you can always feel the dry heat hardening anything that is able to survive in such hostile environments.
The hectic shooting and visual splendor go hand-in-hand with Returnal’s signature bullet hell ballet (which has been a hallmark of Housemarque for years, even dating back to games like 2013’s Resogun). Blasting a bot is only part of the battle; the trick is getting into the right position to do so as you avoid enormous energy balls that spew out in the kind of patterns you’d see in a classic arcade shoot-’em-up. That hook remains thrilling in Saros, requiring you to make a lot of snap daredevil decisions during a shootout. The quick and fluid movement gives you enough flexibility to dance out of any situation so long as you can read and react to the danger fast enough.
Devraj has a few ways of dealing with enemy fire aside from dashing through it, though perhaps a few too many. A shield ability allows him to block blue energy balls and absorb them into his weapons. It’s a niche maneuver that mostly comes in handy during big boss attacks, but it gives players a new way to mitigate damage that requires a bit of risk-taking. Then there’s a shield-breaking melee and a parry ability that lets Devraj knock undodgeable red shots away. All of these techniques feel rewarding to execute thanks to strong tactile feedback, but they do start to make the action feel a little too telegraphed. Every shootout is a flashy Simon Says where defense is color-coded.
Survival isn’t so much a matter of learning enemy behaviors and mastering movement; it’s about buying a ton of upgrades.
Many of Saros’ design iterations seem to be in service of approachability, a goal I’m always in favor of. Returnal was notoriously difficult, after all, giving players a hell of a challenge as early as the game’s second biome. I imagine that few players really got to experience what makes Selene such a strong character. With Saros, Housemarque has heavily overcorrected for Returnal’s perceived sins. The defensive maneuvers are perfectly fun tools on their own, but they compound with larger decisions that downright trivialize the core roguelike.
For instance, Saros’ biggest change from Returnal is that it has significantly more meta progression. Every time you die, you’ll walk away with thousands of Lucenite that can be spent to unlock nodes on an enormous skill tree. Some of those nodes amount to basic health and defense boosts, but others are more impactful. One permanently unlocks the ability to revive once after dying (a perk that you had to find during a run in Returnal), while another imbues Devraj’s melee with explosive properties. Survival isn’t so much a matter of learning enemy behaviors and mastering movement; it’s about buying a ton of upgrades. Early in the game, I’d usually only reach a boss and die to it once before becoming powerful enough to return and beat it thanks to picking up a dozen upgrades.
That progression comes at the expense of the roguelike format, where Devraj has to make it through a series of shifting biomes. With so many skills treated as permanent upgrades, there aren’t many build options for players to experiment with. Artifacts will give Devraj simple perks like raising multikill damage, but very few feel all that impactful or synergistic with other artifacts. Saros tries to bring a layer of risk into play by including artifacts that come with a downside, like decreasing damage when standing still or enabling fall damage, but the trade-offs are often negligible. You can get through a biome without ever putting much thought into what artifacts you equip or even what weapons you pick up. The gun with the higher number score is usually your best bet.
Saros’ struggle to balance roguelike play and approachable action comes to a head in Housemarque’s most underdeveloped system: Carcosan Modifiers. After clearing the first few biomes, you quietly unlock an underexplained modification system that further does away with the need for thoughtful builds. The idea is that you can equip positive mods before entering a run, but you’ll need to make a trade by equipping some negative traits too. So if you want a defense boost (on top of the constant defense boosts you unlock via the skill tree, and the defense-boosting artifacts found in runs), you’ll need to make life a little harder for yourself in some way. On paper, it’s a smart approach to difficulty that lets players retune the challenge to their liking.
In practice, it’s too imbalanced to work as intended. As is the case with artifacts, many of the negative traits hardly matter. I chose one that made it so I would bank less Lucenite after a run, but I was getting so much currency per attempt that I was still able to unlock a boatload of upgrades each run. Another negative perk reduces the effectiveness of the shield’s absorption power, something that hardly matters given how niche the ability is. I took those downsides and, in return, upgraded my power and defense. It wasn’t much of a fair trade; I practically became invincible from that point on. I beat the last four or five biomes without dying once, completing the game in just over 10 hours. It didn’t matter what artifacts I picked up along the way; I was playing a regular linear action game at that point.
I don’t know if it’s accurate to call Saros easy. You ultimately have full control over how many systems you engage with and can mod the experience to make it much harder, though there’s not really an incentive to do so. The problem is that Saros doesn’t do a very good job of communicating how its many systems work. That makes it too easy to inadvertently take any form of challenge out of the game when you think you’re just tinkering with systems as intended. I went through the entire game without paying attention to a poorly-explained Adrenaline system at all. There are so many features functioning as life rafts that it’s hard to truly sink.
All of that is fine for Saros as a thrilling shooter. Being able to turn yourself into an overpowered king by flipping a few switches has its advantages. It gave me more breathing room to marvel at Carcosa’s ornate alien architecture. It let me try different artifacts and test out how a negative perk would mess with my play style. And it allowed me to get more aggressive in battle, which meant generating more glorious particle explosions that put my PS5 Pro to work. Even with my frustrations, Saros still had me glued to my controller as a work of pure sci-fi spectacle with an eerie atmosphere that bleeds out of your TV.
It’s just unfortunate that it comes at the expense of Devraj. There’s no sense that the character is growing through failure in the meandering story. There’s no cycle of death and resurrection that pushes you to try some new artifacts or refine your approach to a biome. Both you and Devraj are too protected from danger, something that rings hollow in a story about a brutal world that pushes people to the brink of madness. I found myself wishing that my choices in a run mattered, because it would give me a sign that Devraj was learning and adapting alongside me. Instead, I was consumed by power fantasy.
And maybe that’s a lesson in temptation. Devraj is a fireball always on the verge of combusting. With Kohli’s growling performance, you’re always waiting for the moment when the character might just snap and unleash the fury of a thousand stars on Carcosa. Maybe I’m the one that failed him by responding to some early-game setbacks by cranking up power dials that Saros made a point to not tell me about. I chose to transform him into the most ruthless version of himself instead of guiding him on a path towards incremental change or embracing Saros’ challenges with poise and patience, turning Devraj, and myself, into supernovas looking for an excuse to burn.
Saros will be released April 30 on PlayStation 5. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 Pro using a prerelease download code provided by Sony. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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