“ARCADE IS DEAD,” developer Housemarque abruptly decreed in all caps on its blog shortly after Matterfall’s release in 2017.
This candid manifesto explained how the team saw no future developing the arcadey games it had specialized in for over two decades and was moving onto different genres. Returnal was the result of this shift in focus, taking the aesthetics and chaos inherent to Housemarque’s house style and throwing it all into a roguelike third-person shooter. It was a cult hit that saw critical acclaim, but Saros, Returnal’s spiritual sequel, seems to rebuke that glorious foundation by shunning the very genre with which Housemarque had just found great success. By paring back its roguelike elements in an effort to broaden its appeal, Saros becomes a discordant game that seems ambivalent towards what came before it.
Given its suite of levels that cycle in various threats, randomized weapons, resources, and perks, Saros is technically a roguelike, even if Housemarque talks around genre specifics. When speaking to Game Informer, art director Simone Silvestri said labels were “ephemeral” and it was “hard for [him] to categorize Saros” because Housemarque “didn’t set out to be in a genre or defy a genre.” Creative director Gregory Louden was similarly elusive in that same interview, while admitting it had “rogue elements.”
The evasiveness makes sense, as a team doesn’t need to always obey all genre tenets to achieve greatness. But this indecisiveness is precisely what has held back Saros and is evident in nearly all of its systems.
This contradiction is most clearly and consistently felt in its gameplay. While Saros’ limited level variety and stagnant bosses are weaknesses that go against the spirit of the genre, its stunted build variety is its most egregious fault. Roguelikes typically thrive on throwing variables at the player–be it a cadre of perks, weapons, or, in Balatro’s case, Jokers–and spontaneous interplay between those variables is what makes the genre so replayable. Crafting a godlike poison build in Slay the Spire or quintupling down on Pair multipliers in Balatro can be electric when it all comes together.
Saros has no such way to reach this same high because it doesn’t give players the means to, demonstrating how the game maintains the trappings of roguelike elements but hollows them out. Its small pool of perks leaves almost zero room for synergy; they barely complement each other, to say nothing of its narrow selection of weapons. There are powerful abilities in Saros, but there aren’t powerful builds, and that’s an important distinction. Any genre can empower players, but roguelikes are designed to give players control over that power; Saros fails to accomplish this.
Yet this is only part of a much broader issue with Housemarque’s decision to scale back on roguelike elements with Saros. Returnal had shops, consumables, an in-run currency, item fabricators, secret rooms, deceased scouts that could initiate fights or yield resources, Reclaimers that healed players or sapped health in exchange for an item, malfunctions that yielded temporary debuffs, parasites that offered pros and cons, and even special stone statues with glowing eyes that dropped resources if players were keen enough to spot them. Saros, however, includes none of those elements and adds nothing in their stead–and the grotesquely large skill tree filled with dull stat upgrades doesn’t even begin to make up for these casualties.
Aggressively scaling back like this has led to a chain reaction of negative outcomes since roguelikes are made of interlocking systems. For example, not being able to spend Lucenite during a run not only snips out the need for stores, but also the possibility of crafting a build that specializes in currency drops or hoarding every cent for extra power. Going from Returnal’s parasites and malfunctions that enrich the other systems by interacting with them–letting crafty players turn debuffs into buffs–to Saros’ negative perks with no such depth or flexibility, succinctly demonstrates this disappointing downgrade in complexity. Creativity gets cut down with each cutback.
A cascade of bewildering decisions like this betrays the foundation Returnal helped establish, leading to a spiritual successor that’s somehow more shallow than its predecessor. Returnal wasn’t the deepest roguelike in 2021, either, reflecting Housemarque’s inexperience with the genre and how said genre wasn’t quite as refined back then. Rooms in Returnal repeated fairly often and didn’t hold many special surprises, bosses didn’t change, and its ability to craft builds–while there in some form–wasn’t quite as deep as it could have been. Even still, it was one of those alluring debuts, like Mass Effect or Dishonored, that was excellent, yet still showed plenty of room for improvement. Doubling down on its roguelike qualities seemed like the obvious way forward, considering Returnal’s ability to bring AAA third-person shooters into the roguelike space was a substantial part of its special formula.
And yet, that’s not what Housemarque opted to do. Instead, associate design director Matti Häkli told Polygon the studio wanted to “start building something that is more approachable,” while Louden emphasized how he wanted more people to get into Housemarque’s games.
Creating more approachable roguelikes is a worthy endeavor, and has led to substantial improvements in the genre over the years. Titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, The Last of Us Part II’s No Return mode, and Lost in Random: The Eternal Die have difficulty levels. Absolum has various assists. Hades 2 brings over the God Mode modifier from the original that makes the game easier as players perish, something [REDACTED] also cleverly borrows. Games in this genre–even if through settings that clearly state they deviate from the intended experience–are easier to complete than ever before. The problem with Saros is not that it tries to be an approachable roguelike, but rather that it strips itself of nearly all roguelike elements in its effort to be approachable.
Warping past cleared levels and straight to new ones is a genre-bending measure meant to ensure newcomers don’t get stuck on Saros’ first biome, which happened to many in Returnal. But this highlights how run length plays an outsized factor in Saros’ uneven difficulty curve. Teleporting straight to new levels often leads to deadly, spongy enemies, while starting a clean run from the first stage turns players into unstoppable gods, since weapons predominantly gain power simply by killing. That means Saros is either usually too easy or too tediously hard, a schism that highlights the beauty of the smoother and more predictable difficulty curves other roguelikes create by forcing players to start at the beginning. Overwhelming challenge is not a requirement for roguelikes, but sanding down Returnal’s prickliest roguelike edge of making players restart each time has negatively impacted the whole game in Saros.
Despite claims to the contrary, the Carcosan Modifier system, which allows players to add buffs or debuffs before heading into a run, isn’t an all-curing salve, either. Because of the sporadic difficulty and power creep inherent to the skill tree, it’s impossible to know what modifiers will lead to the best challenge at any given moment, and it’s not worth micromanaging the mod loadout each time. Offloading the difficulty balancing onto the player in this extreme a way isn’t an elegant solution, and further exemplifies how Housemarque’s debilitating hesitancy diminishes the experience. Louden told Multiplayer.it that Carcosan Modifiers were added “very late” in development, and the slapdash nature of their inclusion makes that incredibly clear.
Spoilers for Hades, Hades 2, God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, Returnal, and Saros ahead.
Saros’ unfaithfulness to the roguelike genre doesn’t just harm its gameplay. Roguelikes with memorable stories often center around topics that can be endlessly explored, taking cues from the genre’s cyclical nature. The roguelike design requirement to offer players new, randomly created runs every time they boot up means endings can’t truly be definitive, and the best of the best work with this quirk. God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla has Kratos run the loop as a way to continue his noble and endless journey of self-improvement, even after the climax has him directly facing his past. Hades twists this genre conceit in a more comical way, by turning Zagreus into the Underworld’s own security specialist hellbent on making sure no one else can escape the afterlife’s grasp. Hades 2’s justification of ensuring “time flows freely forth” is much more flimsy, but it at least attempts to explain why Melinoë has to repeatedly strike down Chronos and Typhon.
Returnal is still one of the genre standouts in this regard, though. Its solitary protagonist, Selene, is tortured by her shortcomings as a mother and inability to come to terms with past mistakes. Each run is a cosmically constructed purgatory meant for endless repentance.
Ambiguity lingers even over the final ending of Returnal, but any optimism is quickly dashed. The cycle just repeats again shortly after. Players exit the starting ship with a gun and drop of hope this might end soon, the same as they did the time before. It uses the repetition inherent to the genre to paint a grim picture and say the unsaid: Selene will never escape this hell, even if she wanders near its precipice. It’s as unsympathetic as it is dark. Atropos, the planet the game supposedly takes place on, lives up to the inflexibility of the Sister of Fate it is named after. Returnal’s gameplay, offering endless runs, dictates its story.
Saros goes through similar steps for its main character, Arjun, who is meant to ruminate on his failures when faced with the flashbacks and revelations that come after slaying each of its twisted Overlords. While less elegant than Returnal, it follows that same structure until the true ending. Arjun shuns his anger and struts past the King without landing the killing blow, the blow that transforms him into said royal monster. The Shore, once perverted by blazing fire and an angry sun, is calm and serene. Arjun accepts responsibility and is greeted by Nitya, the woman he’s been chasing throughout this Lovecraftian nightmare. Noticing his newfound maturity, she tells him it is a “new day” and asks him what he’ll do with it. Arjun, even with the crestfallen face of a person about to face the music, has finally found a smidge of peace and broken free of the Shore’s pernicious grasp.
But it is not a new day. Players are jettisoned right back to the Passage as if nothing happened. Confronting the King once again plays the same cutscene. Saros, while often opaque, is rather clear about the narrative implications of its ending. It’s not as ambiguous as Returnal and therefore can’t use the way in which it dumps its protagonist back off at the beginning to smoothly imply Arjun is trapped in a recurring hell similar to Selene. The story says he’s done, but the gameplay necessities of the genre say he isn’t, and Saros doesn’t reckon with that disconnect at all. Louden told The Verge the “cinematics [are] about questions” and the “gameplay is the answer,” but that is incongruent with the game’s finale. Saros uses the narrative trappings specific to roguelikes, yet completely abandons them when it becomes too inconvenient, and that undercuts the story it’s trying to tell.
With such an overall half-baked commitment to the roguelike genre, it’s easy to just proclaim Housemarque should have just focused on Saros’ smooth controls and fashioned it into a linear third-person shooter, without including even a trace of roguelike DNA. But that is a surface-level assessment. Returnal’s success was predicated on its roguelike qualities and was a much more interesting game because of them; a version of Returnal that was strictly a third-person shooter wouldn’t have been as captivating. Pivoting to something more generic is not the remedy here.
Saros may have reviewed well and, in some cases, slightly better than Returnal. However, it seems destined to fade from the collective consciousness more quickly. Saros’ reluctance to embrace the same qualities that made Returnal stand out has robbed it of depth and staying power. While it’s easier to get into, that digestibility has made it a shallower game that’s constantly fighting itself. Housemarque is at its best when boldly pushing forward, not attempting to cater to every crowd at once. The studio may have not penned a blog post titled “THE ROGUELIKE IS DEAD,” but it sure acted like it did, given Saros’ many contradictions.
