Saros is a tough game, but if you’re just that level of Gamer that you find yourself swooping and swerving through its punishing bullet-hell firefights, you might actually be doing yourself a disservice. As crazy as it sounds, it might actually be a good idea to die on purpose a number of times, especially in the earlier sections.
Without getting into spoilers, Saros is similar to roguelike games like Hades in that a lot of its storyline happens in between runs. Each time protagonist Arjun dies, he’s sent back to the Passage, his team’s base of operations as they try to find out what happened to their settling colleagues on the hellish planet of Carcosa. When you return here, the rest of the cast will be doing their own thing, and since they’re not going out on runs with you, this is your best chance to get to know them. You’ll have conversations with them, find audio and text logs that dive into their histories, and see the Passage gradually change as time goes on.
On paper, this is a smart structure because it gives you something to look forward to even when you fail. Saros plays with the passage of time, so sometimes you’ll return to the base and see it having changed in subtle ways, while other runs will bring you back to a pretty changed space. The trouble is, you can miss out on a lot of those details and story beats if you start off wrecking shop.
In my first playthrough, I died a collective 38 times over the course of 25 hours or so. I went back to the Passage frequently enough that I saw a lot of this stuff firsthand. In my second playthrough, I only died about 10 times, and I was struck by how quickly some of the story developments were thrown at me just because I managed to use all my game knowledge to burn through the early sections without much trouble.
Of course, most folks will likely naturally die often enough in the first half to see what they need to see. But if you’re managing to skate through Saros with relative ease, you may be missing out on some of the most enriching character development for its larger cast. Saros makes sure you see the most important scenes to comprehend what’s going on, but death is kind of a requirement to see everything. So, I don’t know, go T-pose in front of a pack of demons a few times before finishing a zone.
