Trip Report: Saros (Patreon)

Saros has some neat ideas and it plays well and it’s not really doing much for me at all. I think I maybe burned out on this idea a bit playing the PC version of Returnal, which landed back in 2023. Also the characters and their interactions are awkward and sometimes feel like they’re playing out of order, like you suddenly find yourself talking to someone about something you discovered three or four runs ago. I haven’t finished the game, so I’m not going to call this a full review. But even though I seem to be in what appears to be the final area, I’m not sure that I’m going to see this one through.

At times I wished that the ideas and improvements to the formula were just patched into Returnal to make it a more approachable game, overall. At times I kept wanting to say things like “Saros is to Heretic as Returnal is to Doom” or “Saros is to Frenzy as Returnal is to Berzerk” or something like that. Either way Saros is a clear follow-up that reuses most of the gameplay ideas of Returnal, tacks on some new stuff that largely serves to make the game a little easier, and gives you a different setting and set of characters that I did not connect with in any way. Saros, at times, feels like an apology for Returnal’s often-uncaring difficulty and structure, which not only required you to get good but also to deal with lengthy runs that would, at times, get a bit exhausting.

In contrast, Saros runs usually seem to top out around 30 minutes, after which you’re thrust back to your base, where three or four other members of your squad hang out and have predictable "we are in the process of losing our minds in a cosmic horror sort of way" arguments with each other. You’ve found yourself stuck on an alien planet covered with the ruins of what seems like a once-great civilization. You’re also the fourth ship to land there… so what happened to the other three? You’ll traverse a handful of different biomes chasing signals and trying to reach a city as you search for the answer and, ya know, slowly go nuts in the process.

That's cosmic horror, baby. You know, tentacles coming out of the walls, tentacles coming off of the enemies, things of that nature. The land (Carcosa) and some other concepts in the story have been borrowed from an 1895 short story collection called The King in Yellow, which I will admit to not having heard of until I started reading up on the lore of Saros. Sounds like an early, influential work that inspired Lovecraft.

The catch on those tentacles is that they aren’t always there. There’s a neat phase shift that occurs during your runs where you need to manually trigger an eclipse in order to proceed. Some levels give you multiple opportunities to trigger the eclipse, making it a sort of risk vs. reward situation because everything is harder when the sun is covered up. Enemies fire more and more dangerous projectiles, including corruption shots that lower your maximum health if they land. Difficult, optional areas show also up when the eclipse is on.

You have a very effective dash at your disposal along with a shield that absorbs blue bullets, which charges your power weapon. You’ll also find power-ups and new weapons along the way, though power-ups collected during the eclipse also come with a negative effect, forcing you to try to balance out some pros and cons if you want to get more powerful during the back half of your run. I found myself skipping the vast majority of the power-ups during an eclipse and never felt particularly under-equipped for the tasks sent my way.

The guns in Saros are really neat and come in some exciting varieties, but the core trait that most of them share is an astoundingly generous auto-aim. Considering you may be dashing out of the one of one attack while trying to get your shield up to catch another while turning to face a grapple point while also trying to do some damage, not having to worry about lining up a shot is a welcome relief. Of course, you will also find the occasional weapon that disables “auto hit” in favor of some different options, so you can certainly make that trade-off, if you like. In my experience, the manually aimed weapons never appeared to be worth it. The game also eventually unlocks a series of modifiers you can turn on to remix the game a bit—things like “remove all corruption from artifacts” are insanely useful, but you might need to enable “come home with way less upgrade currency” or “enemies do more damage” or something to that effect to get it all to remain in balance, because the game won't let you just turn on all the easy modifiers.

When you ask me what I remember about Returnal, the first thing that comes to mind is the haptic feedback. The way the raindrops caused tiny pings on the controller or the way the game used the analog trigger resistance to give the weapons additional nuance and alt-fire options. Saros does another wonderful job here, truly top-notch stuff.

Visually I think the game has some nice areas but occasionally some awkward animation, especially back at home base. Scenes where you speak with the rest of your crew are stilted and awkward, with your character (his name is Arjun, by the way) just stoically holding his weapon at the ready, same as he does when you’re in the middle of a run. These sorts of awkward moments do hammer home Housemarque’s devotion to providing some sort of “arcade-like” package… it’s clear they ain’t makin’ movies here. Either way it’s noticeable.

Saros is a curious game, it’s designed to make progression easier and smoother than its predecessor. After eight or so hours with it, I’m at an area that, narratively, anyway, feels like the final zone. Progress feels steady and, perhaps, assured. While I tend to agree that Returnal was probably too much for a lot of people, Saros feels de-fanged to a point that makes a lot of the game feel almost trivial. Even though the levels are stuffed with grapple points and other mobility cues that require abilities you don’t have your first time through, I have zero desire to go back and get the rest of the audio logs or anything else. Ideally you want a run-based game that inspires you to take “one more run” before bed. Saros feels like a “no more runs for me, thanks” version of that. It’s certainly not a bad game, but I’m left near what is supposed to be the thing that the story has been building up to over these last eight hours and feel little to no desire to find what Arjun has been looking for this entire time. On the gameplay side, the bosses have been flat and predictable, which doesn’t leave me wanting to see what’s next.

The individual pieces have merit, but the whole is lacking. I am not passionate about Saros, but maybe you will be.