Saros Review

Carcosa is a strange place. It's an alien planet strewn with scary gothic architecture -- grotesque castles and stone pillars of twisted arms and hands -- where you'll die and die again and again, only to come back to life every time, good-as-new. In other words, it's the perfect place to set a game like Saros, an unsettling, roguelike 3rd-person shooter of mildly punishing difficulty, inspired by The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.

Your boss, the Soltari corporation, seemingly run by maximalist capitalists, seeks the rare mineral, lucenite, and intends to establish a mining colony on Carcosa to procure it. To that end, they've sent three waves of mining teams, or Echelons, as they call them, to harvest as much lucenite as possible. Things go swimmingly, until Soltari loses contact with all three of those initial Echelons, prompting them to send another one, Echelon IV, to discover what went wrong.

You play as Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli), an enforcer from Echelon IV who's looking for his wife, Nitya Chandran (Shunori Ramanathan), a biologist from Echelon I who was studying the bizarre life forms of Carcosa. The main roadblock to finding her? The hordes of those hostile life forms lurking around every corner of the planet. Even worse is the solar eclipse, which really riles up the baddies and seems to have a negative psychological effect on humans.

Arjun dies over and over, yet is revived back at the base camp every time with no memory of how it happened, as if by magic. This is the game's basic way of incorporating the roguelike gameplay into the story, which is mainly told through dreamy, elliptical flashbacks and voice recordings scattered throughout the alien land. When you return to your quest, you'll find that the environments aren't quite the same as before, save for a few key locations in each biome that stay the same every time.

The best thing about Saros is how smoothly it controls. It feels better and is generally more responsive than 90+% of games on the market. That's really important, because you spend virtually the entire game dodging huge streams and webs of laser bullets of various colors, some blockable some not, whilst strafing and shooting at robotic aliens. It's especially satisfying when you're able to get in close to an enemy to land a devastating melee hit. The fast pace of the combat gets your heart racing, and the stakes always feel high, because you don't want to have to replay the entire area.

The multi-phase boss battles with the enemies called Overlords will have you sprinting around large arenas, panting and hoping you'll make it out alive, as flurries of projectiles rain down over you. My favorite Overlord was the fast, vicious, animalistic melee fighter, Rhabdom, but that's mainly because he only had one life bar, and I beat him on my first try. For those with lousy aim, there are certain guns that spray homing bullets at enemies, which is convenient. Sometimes, however, the game will force you to replace your existing gun with one you don't like as much to progress the story, which was always an annoying setback.

Overall, Saros offers the player much more of a helping hand than Housemarque's previous game, Returnal. First of all, there are checkpoints, allowing the player to return to later areas without having to re-brave all the previous ones. (That said, if you're looking to upgrade your defense and attack abilities, starting at earlier stages could be a good strategy to collect more lucenite, which you use to unlock branched nodes on a skill tree.) Housemarque has also made your life a bit easier by allowing you to spend halcyon on Carcosan Modifiers. These offer tremendous benefits like increased attack power and defense, the refilling of your life bar upon reaching a boss, and the restoration of your second chance (read: extra life) upon beating a boss. But the game doesn't allow you to load up on all of the modifiers at once, making you pick and choose which ones you'll use, if any.

Playing Saros eventually becomes a bit of a suffocating experience, less-so because of its structure, moreso because of the general saminess of its grim gothic environments and enemies, and a story that doesn't take you anywhere particularly interesting. The game seems content to riff over and over on basic themes of obsession and loss of control. Indeed, this is the arc of pretty much every character in the game, both the onscreen ones and those who have left behind recordings of their stories -- invariably descending into madness, praising the glorious, enigmatic Yellow Shore.

Saros tries to keep you guessing about its protagonist, Arjun. Clearly, he has done some awful things in his life, but the game will only hint at them. And given his prior relationship with his close friend, Sebastian, you start to wonder why he's so deadset on finding Nitya anyway. Saros doesn't really follow through on developing him as a character, unless you aim for the true ending by beating the final boss twice. Then the game throws you some extra recordings. But even then it's a little oblique.

Ultimately, Saros is worth it, if you're signing up for a seamless action game experience. If you want a rich narrative experience, however, the game is a bit like eating a delicious-looking dumpling that's filled with perfumed air.

Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment