Saros Is a Haven for Bullet Hell Lovers

I’ll give it to you straight - Saros is a more accessible, more mainstream-friendly version of Returnal. Its story is more explicit, its gunplay more punchy, and its deaths more rewarding. And that is both a boon and a bane, coming from a first-party studio, depending on who you ask. For my money, I like it. While I appreciate Returnal’s more experimental storytelling, it proved a little too difficult for me to reap its rewards. Saros, on the other hand, leaves it up to the player to tune their gameplay experience as they see fit.

Saros is not a direct sequel to Returnal. Despite sharing the core gameplay formula and some visual hallmarks, Housemarque makes it clear that Saros is its own beast. Set on the shifting alien planet of Carcosa, Saros follows Arjun Devraj of the Echelon IV emergency response team on his quest to find answers and his estranged wife. Like many other AAA games of its stature, Saros offers a surface-level exploration of a corporation’s greed for mining a planet’s resources. However, that’s just the backdrop, as the more compelling narrative is focused on Arjun’s mysterious relationship with the planet and its inhabitants.

Note: You can listen to my first impressions of Saros on the Day Zero podcast, with more expanded discussion in a newer episode.

If Returnal was about looking inward, Saros is about the consequences of your actions, levying a heavy toll on others. Its story is more literal, taking most of the steam away from the “it’s all a dream” trope. You can still read into it if you like, but it’s clear that Saros shows more commitment to being a traditional video game.

The core loop sees Arjun going out on excursions across the planet’s various biomes, taking down enemies, dying, and returning stronger. Along the way, you’ll be earning a variety of upgrades, from new weapons to improving life support, shields, and eventually turning the enemy’s projectiles against them. The tagline, “Come Back Stronger”, is in full effect. I love it. It doesn’t render those 20-minute-long excursions completely useless. Saros is always rewarding you for your inconvenience. It’s less hardcore, but there are enough tools to make your life hell if you want it.

Saros will fill your screen with more colourful projectiles than you can count.

Following Housemarque’s markee visual style, Saros will fill your screen with more colourful projectiles than you can count. When you lock in, your peripheral vision effortlessly becomes your biggest tool. Dashing, jumping, grappling through enemies, absorbing impacts, redistributing that energy across the arena, it all becomes second nature as you master your grip over the game’s controls. 

Speaking of controls, this game plays like a dream. I never liked Returnal’s sprint button. For one, it was assigned to the wrong input, and secondly, it felt like an obvious default state of movement. Saros makes Arjun’s default movement speed the same as Selene’s sprinting burst. The melee button, which also doubles as the shield, is mapped to the shoulder button. The sprint gives you an extra boost when not in combat, to sprint through arenas faster during repeat runs. Your thumbs never have to leave the sticks, so you retain full control over your surroundings. The best controls feel less like puppeteering and more like an extension of your own autonomy. This does the latter.

Where the game falters is in nailing a balancing act. In its attempt to be more accessible, it offers too much freedom in its upgrades, and weapon balance isn’t great either. No, I won’t be upgrading from a level 12 smart rifle to a level 20 pistol, no matter how hard that pistol might hit. You’re not so much “aiming” as you are shooting in the general direction of enemies. Bullets have a tendency to fall into an enemy’s gravity well here, and I’m not complaining. Given how many enemies surround you from the sides and above, weapons that jettison a spread of bullets are always an advantage.

The alt-fire returns, and boy does it feel good. There are only a handful of games that take full advantage of the PS5’s DualSense controller, with its haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. Returnal, Astro Bot, and now Saros join that list. It’s not as overwhelming on your senses as Returnal was, requiring slightly less effort to actuate the triggers, with more subtle vibrations to simulate the environment. This is the way. Oh, and the addition of a perfect reload? Like Gears of War? Thank you, Housemarque.

Its expansive upgrade tree aside, Saros also offers modifiers to switch up your experience. In essence, it feels like an unofficial mod menu snuck into the official game. I’m not sure if it makes the overall experience that much better, especially on a first run. For me, I used it to stack up boons to slice through enemies easier, but others may stack banes to make their journey through hell harder. It really depends on your particular preference when it comes to game difficulty.

After all of that, we touch on the game’s most unique mechanic - the Eclipse. Arjun will usually happen upon an Eclipse trigger halfway through a map, which, upon activation, changes the world state of the biome. Enemies hit harder, semi-permanent corruption starts filling up on your life bar, and artefact pickups now offer a stat boost combined with a bane. It’s essentially the game entering a hyper-focused “risk vs reward” state. In it, your rewards are also better, as you collect more Lucenite, the game’s currency for upgrades. I like it. It adds the appropriate amount of tension to the adventure, besides plugging into the game’s themes. The same goes for the Nightmare Strands - arenas with increasingly difficult hordes that reward great boons and a chance to replenish your second revival perk.

Boss fights in Saros are similar to those in Returnal, but with more windows of opportunity to defend yourself. While Arjun is faster than Selene, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily required to dart around the map. The shield can only absorb certain types of projectiles and parry others. Learning an enemy’s attack patterns and phases is still the meat of the encounters, but the pace of those fights is also ratcheted up to counter the expanded defensive options.

While I like both Returnal and Saros’ drip-feed method of dropping narratively heavy cutscenes, I would have liked a more polished approach to the latter’s in-game interactions. Most of the interactions with NPCs in Saros boil down to approaching them, hitting the “talk” button, and seeing an awkwardly posed Arjun exchanging information with said NPC. I know that Rahul Kohli, Jane Perry, Keone Young, and everyone else are committing to performing in an apocalyptic scenario. But their animations don’t sync up with the dialogue in a convincing way, making most of it fall flat. It doesn’t bother me so much because that’s not the game’s primary objective, but in 2026, we expect better.

Saros PS5 Performance

Saros was built for PS5, so of course, it runs great. A virtually perfect 60fps presentation keeps things smooth, though some of its limitations do become noticeable. Shimmering edges, anti-aliasing that breaks down in the distance, and a less-sharp-than-ideal presentation during dialogue scenes are its minor drawbacks. But all of that is only noticeable for the sharpest pixel peepers, and I am one of them.

Verdict

Saros is a haven for bullet hell lovers, opening its doors to casual players with more accessible difficulty and a more explicit narrative that doubles as a worthy spiritual successor to Returnal.

REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY SONY PLAYSTATION.

Saros is available on PlayStation 5.