Saros isn't Returnal 2, but this roguelike follow-up still takes the foundations introduced there as its primary point of inspiration. On the surface, the shared DNA is obvious, but just a few subtle changes mean that the deeper you get into Saros, the more different you realize it is – to the point where my hands-on with Saros didn't click until the game's first boss, Prophet, shook me hard enough to stop trying to play it like Returnal.
"It is a skill check, yeah," grins lead game designer Abebe Tinari when I relate that my hands were shaking by the time I eventually beat it. "We tried to really tailor that early experience, but not in the way of adding more text tutorials or making people read a bunch of long explanations. It was more – how can people organically discover these mechanics?" says Tinari. "With the very first mech enemy, here's this long line of bullets. What do you do with it? Well, you have to dodge it. Or, you could pop your shield and run into it."
Shot through the heart
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Tinari is, of course, right – I began my demo instinctively dodging to the side of these long lines of orbal bullets, but noticing they would linger in the air, I switched to running through them with my shield like I'm munching Pac-Man pellets, using the energy boost to charge my power shot. This high-impact super weapon is one you're encouraged to keep using when your shield is overcharged, momentum in play seeing me topping it off constantly in firefights for a ready supply.
"You have this flying enemy that has this nice curving arc of homing bullets, right? So, in Returnal, you have to dash," says Tinari. These shots, like Dio's daggers from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, hover briefly in the air before hitting at high-speed, requiring solid timing to get out of the way in both Saros and Returnal. But, the shield option in Saros turns the bullet pattern on its head, from highly deadly to highly useful. "Those come right to you, and turn into power," he says. "We tried to space out those beats so that before you get to the first boss, you're introduced to all the tools you need to defeat it. Hopefully!"
As well as getting me used to using my shield to absorb bullets, Saros' first area also introduces me to the planet Carcosa's strange eclipses. Activated partway through a level, this changes the biome visually, the way enemies act, the risk-reward factors of loot, and adds corrupted enemy bullets to the mix. Yellow rather than the standard blue, Arjun learns how to absorb these early on, but the stored energy temporarily reduces his maximum armor until you blast out the power shots.
"You can't actually die from corruption. There is a limit, I think it's about 90% of your integrity. that it won't go beyond," says Tinari. When battling the first boss, I end up on the very edge of death as I exchange fire with it, using my shield as much as possible. "It puts you in the red health state, where one more hit will take you out, right? So if you're willing to kind of take those bullets, you get the power, but then it gets more and more dangerous," he says.
Saros encourages an aggressive playstyle that rewards taking risks. While that's not totally absent in Returnal, it did feel like the best option was often to stay as far away from enemy bullets as possible. Saros, on the other hand, deliberately complicates this dynamic, and it's not just about the shield removing damage, but how far you want to go in using it to strike back. Battles might look similar at a glance, but it completely changes how you approach firefights in Saros compared to Returnal.
"The biggest one was to account for the shield," says Tinari. "Just for some context, I arrived here a year and a half ago, so I've been working on the enemies since then, and we made pretty much every bullet pattern you see within the last year and a half. It was a really fun process. But it was difficult. The shield on paper, it's like one thing – OK, they have the dash, they have the jump, now they have the shield. One more thing, right? That one thing changes everything. Because you have this option of just standing still and popping the shield, and all the bullets, if they're homing bullets, they all come to you. It completely changed how we make patterns."
The addition of the shield simply gives you so many more options for Arjun to tackle foes. "There's an enemy in the second biome, this giant mech, it either opens sideways and fires a tunnel of bullets, or it has a little cannon that pops up from the top and fires a big, fast moving burst of bullets," says Tinari. "With the top one, you're encouraged to dash quickly to avoid it. With the tunnel, what we wanted to do is kind of challenge you to shield the edge of it, to get the power from it. But it has one – we call it a nova bullet – a red bullet in the center that will break your shield. That, in Returnal, would not make sense, because you have no reason to challenge yourself to get inside the tunnel. You would just dash away from it, right? But, because we now have these mechanics, we can layer these different bullet types in ways that tempt you to do those tricky things."
How much do you feather the stick?
Likewise, second boss Bastion allows me to approach it like I might a firefight in Returnal, thanks to its wider arena, but constantly presents intriguing ways to use my shield to get the upperhand.
"There's one attack that – I totally see what you're saying about how it's more about dashing and jumping, like Returnal – but there's one attack I really am proud of, which is a big laser attack," says Tinari. "It's a laser with a spiral of bullets around the outside. The idea there is that you can just run away from it. You're fast enough to outrun it. But if you walk slowly on purpose while your shield is active, you can just absorb all the bullets off the side without the beam touching you, and then get this massive charge of power all at once."
I compare the approach, daring Arjun to get close to enemy fire without getting hurt, as being like Crazy Taxi. "I was playing it two weeks ago!" says Tinari (the Dreamcast is his favorite console, which is correct). Drive close to oncoming traffic in that Sega classic, and the Crazy Through gives you a speed boost. "Classic, like, Burnout-style," Tinari adds. "A near miss!"
The approach gives Saros an extra dimension of creativity and player expression. Even though you could stay on the move as far away from enemy fire as possible, it's clear that's sub-optimal. How far do you want to go in order to play Saros better? To finesse it?
"One of the coolest action mechanics is [what] I think of as analog interactions. So, a binary interaction is like: you jump or you don't. But analog is more like, how much do you feather the stick?" says Tinari. "Going back to Bastion's beam – do you dash away from it? It might be challenging in a timing sense, but it's just one decision you make. This act of regulating how much your thumb is moving on the stick to kind of just get the right distance, that's the real depth."
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