Returnal’s challenging bullet-ballet helped it win Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2021. That same difficulty had an unfortunate consequence: too few players actually finished it. Housemarque didn’t want players to face such a steep barrier with Saros. Speaking ahead of his PAX Aus keynote panel, Saros’ creative director Gregory Louden tells me he sees firm evidence that Housemarque succeeded.
“It's been nice being at Melbourne International Games Week. I've had a lot of different developers and other people telling me, ‘I beat Saros. I couldn't beat Returnal, but I beat Saros, and I loved it,’” says Louden, who has unintentionally made a pairing whose difficulty curve makes them arguably best experienced in reverse-chronological order.
“I'm even hearing people are finishing Saros and then finishing Returnal; because they've had the training wheels of Saros, they've managed to adapt it to their experience, they've learned how to dance with the projectiles.”
Louden himself had to learn a new dance while working on this project. After Louden established a career in narrative design at Remedy, where he worked on Quantum Break and Control, Saros was his first major title with creative director duties.
“I thought I was busy being a narrative and Cinematic director, but it was a whole other level!” says Louden, who saw his role enabling collaborators (including lead actor Rahul Kohli as Arjun, who he wisely encouraged to stick with his West London accent) rather than strictly enforcing a singular vision. With his expanded remit versus Returnal, he still had to solve that central question around difficulty.
Difficulty modes would be the simple solution, which makes all the back-end decisions in advance for players. But a colleague suggested a better alternative: introducing modifiers, which many roguelikes introduce post-game to further test players once they’ve rolled credits, early so players can customize their own difficulty. “In a lot of ways, the modifiers allowed us to give that opportunity to the player to create their ultimate experience,” says Louden.
And it’s not only necessary due to the rate of enemy fire: Saros makes you entirely relearn your traditional relationship with projectiles. You don’t dodge them or look for cover here: instead, you gladly run into them to charge your power weapons. It results in Arjun chasing down a glittering trail that, if ever seen from a top-down perspective, would look identical to a sinister Pac-Man level - if gobbling ghosts gave you supercharged energy beams.
“We wanted to push the medium of games. That was the goal with Saros.” Returnal’s challenging bullet-ballet helped it win Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2021. That same difficulty had an unfortunate consequence: too few players actually finished it. Housemarque didn’t want players to face such a steep barrier with Saros.
“We went from the obstacle course of Returnal to the playground of Saros, where you can actually now use these with your own ability, and eventually you can even parry them,” says Louden. “Usually if you see danger you go the other way. But just like Arjun, Arjun needs to kind of confront it, and he needs to confront these projectiles; he needs to confront who he is in order to proceed.”
With the Zenith expansion, Housemarque is looking to make Saros both more replayable and accessible. The New Game+ adds even more modifiers. And the Overlord Rush mode pits players against every boss in the game back-to-back, with scores to compete on a global leaderboard. “The keyword I wanted to emphasize is rush,” confides Lauden. “This is super fast, arcadey, super fun. You can take more hits; it's all about the score.”
Outside of adding ample excuses to run back Saros’s gunplay, Zenith also adds Footsteps of the King, new narrative content scattering etchings from a previous king of Carcosa within each run. Louden suspects these additions will reveal some unanswered questions players have been pondering since the game’s release. As you’d expect from Housemarque, they’ll make you work for your worldbuilding rewards.
“You can't just finish the game one more time; you need to keep going. And it gets more interesting the deeper you go,” says Louden. “I can't wait for players to begin to navigate it. It's going to be a nice surprise for them.”
Saros: Zenith comes out later in 2026.
