‘I hope people say this is a bold game’: Housemarque on how Saros evolves Returnal’s punishing formula

Was Returnal too hard? That’s a question that Housemarque, the Finnish Sony first-party studio behind Resogun, Matterfall, and Super Stardust, wrestled with when developing its latest PlayStation exclusive, Saros.

“For us, it was about not diluting the Returnal experience and actually just making sure that it could be more approachable to more people,” said creative director Gregory Louden.

“The game is still going to kick you down. But the difference in Saros is that you come back stronger. It’s literally our tagline. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not a challenging game. It’s challenging and rewarding. So every death is valuable. For us, it was about keeping what made Returnal right and then adding this element that could kind of allow more people to jump into it.”

Like many, when I saw the debut trailer for Saros, and the first details emerged, I was initially worried that the game would be made too easy in response to the criticism of Returnal, so Louden’s comments are good news (“You’re welcome,” he grins).

We’re sitting in Housemarque’s studio in downtown Helsinki. Just 20 minutes down the road, Remedy Entertainment is working on Control Resonant. His small corner of frosty Northern Europe has been a hotbed for video game development for three decades. The team moved to these new digs in 2023, thanks in no small part to the influx of cash it received when it became part of Sony in 2021.

During the week I visited the Nordic home of Love Metal, press and creators from around the world got to try out the first three hours of Saros, a third-person shooter steeped in mystery, and bursting with Housemarque’s arcade origins.

Due to the pandemic, the promotional cycle for Returnal was confined to Zoom calls, meaning this is the first time the team has been able to invite people outside the studio to come in and play their latest game in many years. “It’s really validating,” says Louden. “A lot of us on the team, we knew it was already special, I think, unanimously our people really love this game we’re building, and we’re constantly pushing to make it better and better.”

Saros stars Rahul Kohli as Arjun Devraj. He’s a Soltari Enforcer sent to check on a group of missing explorers who are feared lost on Carcosa, a hostile planet, packed with things that want to kill you. The world of Carcosa seems to be the home to remnants of some kind of sun-worshipping society, as you explore the ruins of crumbling cathedrals and labyrinthine tunnels beneath the surface.

It’s perhaps appropriate that it’s being developed in Finland, a country that sees its northern-most areas receive as little as no sunlight at all during the Winter months. Louden, who, with Saros, steps into the director’s chair for the first time at Housemarque, tells me he’s “a different type of busy,” with a smile.

“I think I’m really lucky to have the opportunity to do this, and for me, being a player, I want to be pushed, I want to be challenged, and I want to play really futuristic and special games that really challenge me and show me things I’ve never seen before. I’m really proud to represent the people in our amazing team, because it’s a dream team we have. There are a lot of very special people.”

“The game is still going to kick you down. But the difference in Saros is that you come back stronger. It’s literally our tagline. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not a challenging game.”

As a Returnal fan, I’m impressed with what I’ve played so far of Saros. The shooting feels weighty, but responsive, and Arjun’s movement is lightning-fast. The game’s art director, Simone Silverstri, tells me he “treats Arjun almost like a Formula One car.”

“As an art director in Housemarque, my job is to get out of the way,” he says. “To make sure things are as clear as possible for the players, because they have split-second decisions to make, these razor-tight encounters, and we don’t want to get in the way of that. We don’t want to stop the players.”

Saros is also a beautiful game. Running on the base PlayStation 5, it maintained a rock-solid 60 frames per second, complimented with striking environment design.

“Here’s a little secret,” Silverstri tells me. “Whoever plays the game and loves to look at the art, when you’re done with the fireworks of combat, just look up. A lot of the detail lives at height. Again, we want to make that mid space as clear as possible, so we put a lot of beautiful details just above the fighting space.”

Like in Returnal, there’s a large variety of weapons to pick up, each of which has an alternative fire function that’s controlled by holding down the trigger halfway. All of this is reflected in the game’s use of PS5’s DualSense controller.

Housemarque remains one of the few studios that use the controller to anything like its potential, and it largely comes down to an authentic love for the tactile feedback it can provide, a love that stretches back before the studio became part of PlayStation.

“As an art director in Housemarque, my job is to get out of the way, to make sure things are as clear as possible for the players, because they have split-second decisions to make, these razor-tight encounters”

“We love the DualSense,” said Louden. “We love 3D audio, we love all those aspects. To me, it pulls you into the experience; it creates a physical experience. We’ve not talked about it much, but you may have noticed even at the initial terminal, we have the haptics, so it’s like you’re touching a keypad. We really want to pull you in.”

This is best felt when Saros’s arsenal of guns is exploding across the screen. Each shot feels deliberate and powerful. The enemies you’re facing have a lot of health, but the combination of the soundtrack, the haptic, and the visuals makes you feel like you’re able to fight back.

The guns in Saros are generated from a list of pre-determined archetypes, but each of these archetypes can have dozens of different variations, meaning you’ll struggle to find the exact same gun twice.

However, this huge list of guns is only half your arsenal. Arjun also has Carcosan Power Weapon, a new devastating attacking option that’s recharged by engaging in the game’s most engaging gameplay loop, the Bullet Ballet.

I first heard this phrase during a pre-demo presentation deep in the bowels of Housemarque’s new home, and at first, I was skeptical. Having sat in on over 100 of these presentations in my career, one gets used to marketing buzzwords and convenient back-of-the-box blurbs.

However, in that one term, Bullet Ballet, Housemarque has perfectly summed up what it feels like to play Saros. You’re not running from enemy gunfire, you’re embracing it.

‘A 10,000 miles an hour game’

By giving players a shield that can not only block attacks but also absorb them and recycle them into power for your Power Weapon attack, it fundamentally changes how the game is played when compared to Returnal.

In Returnal, Selene was a survivor. Everything you encountered was utterly deadly. Kill it before it kills you. Whereas, in Saros, I found myself seeking out enemies, baiting them into shooting me so I could use their attacks as fuel to devastate all around me. While some attacks can’t be absorbed, they can be dodged through, meaning you can close ground on your opponent. If Selene was “Park The Bus,” Arjun is Gegenpress.

The intensity of these mechanics is turned up even further when players engage with the Eclipse. In each biome, a pedestal with a burned hand sticking out of it will tempt players to engage the Eclipse. This changes the visuals of the world and makes the enemies you’re fighting significantly tougher.

It’s a risk-reward system of offering more experience points and the potential of better loot for a far more chaotic experience.

“By giving players a shield that can not only block attacks but also absorb them and recycle them into power, it fundamentally changes how the game is played”

“It’s not easy to make art in a 10,000 miles an hour game,” Silverstri laughs. “Especially in animation. How many frames do you have to do a melee attack in any other action game? Maybe 10, maybe 12? In Saros, you’ve got four frames. How do you sell expression in four frames?”

After a whirlwind run through the opening area, I reached the first boss. This was a skill check on my ability to dodge, absorb enemy bullets, and keep track of the rhythmic patterns of enemy offense. Dying is no great tragedy, not least because it gave me another chance to explore the imposing architecture of Saros’ world.

“For the architecture, I really wanted to try neoclassical,” Silverstri says. “Because we have this civilization of worship for the eclipse. I was referring to, know, neoclassicism is taken from classicism. I’m from Rome. So that’s very comfortable for me as a space.

“And it’s all about the worship of the ideas that are embodied by those Gods. And so these huge statues, this grand scale, this quiet detail, which is very useful because we need to paint, we need to have a canvas, and then paint with gameplay.

“I tried it, I’m like, okay, this feels very safe. It’s the right canvas, but it’s very safe. And so I went to look at Italian futurism, which was actually created in the 1920s as a reaction to neoclassicism. And it was sort of a rebellion to it. And there was a big clash between these two, because, now, classicism and neoclassicism are all about permanence; it’s all about structure.

“Italian futurism was all about dynamism, impermanence, and things that weren’t supposed to be lasting forever. And when we joined them together, it created this very nice, intense, sharp language that still felt grand in scale, that still felt like it was celebrating something. And it took a little bit to mature. It’s not easy to work with opposites, right? And when you tell it to the team, they’re like, OK, how am I supposed to do this?” he laughs.

But how many players, like me on my first run, are so laser-focused on the gameplay itself that the world becomes a beautiful blur? Silvestri smiles as I bring this up, an internal struggle he and countless Housemarque artists before him have faced.

“How many frames do you have to do a melee attack in any other action game? Maybe 10, maybe 12? In Saros, you’ve got four frames. How do you sell expression in four frames?”

“Sometimes you sell the expression on the impact of things. It’s about ‘where do I add the juice?’ where do I really meaningfully enhance the action that the player is doing. It’s a very different challenge and I really, really enjoyed it.”

Saros looks beautiful, but so did Returnal. As graphical advancements diminish in terms of what end users actually get to see, I asked Silverstri if there was anything he wanted from the future of technology from an artistic perspective.

“I think there are two sides to this, right? You know, more power, more possibilities, and just putting more stuff on the screen and having it can be a bit of a trap. know, good art direction, it’s about removing sometimes and focusing on the shape language, focusing on the color palette. Is the image working without all the detail?

“And because you can end up hiding mistakes in the detail. But then on the other side, what I would really use more GPU power on, for example, is the amount of reactivity in the world. Because that’s also what we are specialists in. And the gun is your voice. And you scream at the world. And the world has to answer back. The enemies have to answer back. I think we did a good job with that.

“If I had any other ounce of power in there to go at this rock-solid smooth 60 FPS, which we do on PS5 base and Pro, I would just add more reactivity.”

‘Our story is built to be haunting, interpretive, and ambiguous’

It’s impossible not to see the parallels with Returnal, which are perhaps unsurprising given that Louden served as the narrative director on that game. In fact, eagle-eyed Returnal fans will notice that Harry Krueger, Returnal’s director, who left the studio in 2023, is credited on the game.

“Saros [development] started right after Returnal. A lot of us were focused on Returnal Ascension, our DLC, but [for Saros] it was a very small crew. Harry was there, Ville Kinnunen, our art director from Returnal, Henri Mustonen, and I, setting down that original vision for Saros. From there, we’ve had a really wonderful team of collaborators who have joined it; it’s transformed many times, kind of like Carcosa, but in the end, it’s been a long road.

“It’s actually coming out five years after Returnal, April 30, the exact same day, which is really exciting,” Louden shares with a big smile.

“You’re not alone on this planet. There are other people you can meet and love and lose. So it’s been there since day one. It’s very critical to the experience.”

However, Saros is not a sequel to Returnal, and while there are plenty of similarities, the differences are just as stark. In Saros, players earn experience when out on a run that can then be used back at base to permanently upgrade Arjun. While upgrades are eventually gated by which bosses you’ve defeated in order to stop players feeling overpowered, this is a fundamental change to the punishing loss of progress felt by many a Returnal player.

With Saros, Housemarque achieves a feat that’s rarer and rarer in the modern video game industry: they’re shipping two games on the same console.

“We have a really amazing team. This is a dream project, and it’s a dream team,” Louden tells me. “Everyone is really focused on delivering the best game, and everyone is really invested in this type of vision and really wanting to kind of challenge players with our gameplay, challenge players with our story, with our art direction, sound direction, like in all aspects.

“So I think we’ve had a really exciting thing to kind of galvanize around. We loved Returnal, we knew we wanted to do something new with Saros, and hence just kind of take what we loved from Returnal and then evolve it and keep pushing ourselves.”

One element that has significantly evolved from Returnal is Saros’ focus on storytelling. While Returnal has a huge amount of incredible lore that players can dig through, and a central mystery that’s one of the most compelling in recent games, it’s pretty hard to dig into.

There’s a reason that feature-length YouTube videos explaining the eccentricities of the story or “What You Missed” are so popular.

“We didn’t want to dilute it,” Louden told me. “We were really excited to add more characters. When we were working on Returnal, there was an idea of, let’s have multiple characters. And I think I was one of the people who said, “It’s hard to do one character right. Let’s just do one really well, and then we can grow.”

You’re quickly introduced to the rest of Arjun’s team, including Jane Perry, who starred as Selene in Returnal. Much like with Hades and Hades 2, new dialogue options are revealed every time you return to the starting area, meaning that, while frustrating, deaths are even more rewarding from a narrative perspective.

“You’re not alone on this planet. There are other people you can meet and love and lose. So it’s been there since day one. It’s very critical to the experience. And I think the benefit is that they provide new viewpoints. We also have all the stuff you loved in Returnal. We have these really haunting audio logs.

“We have some really great performances you’ve probably heard from all these different Echelon crew that you can discover, and they get stranger and stranger. So rest assured, all the stuff we had in Returnal was there. Plus, we’ve added even more.”

“At Housemarque, we’re gameplay first. So for us, it’s about allowing you to go into the gameplay, and it’s about protecting that flow”

I asked Louden if he was ever frustrated by players’ complaints about a lack of story in Returnal, or the idea that the game’s deep narrative was too tough to pick through, leading to all of those fan-made explainers. On the contrary, he’s a big fan and watches all of them.

“I think it’s a huge compliment that people create these videos, and I hope they do them for Saros as well. Our story is built to be haunting and interpretive and ambiguous.”

From the opening few hours, Housemarque has absolutely nailed the tone it’s striving for. It’s a deeply uncomfortable and mysterious world to explore. There are very few moments of respite, and I was picking up as many pieces of lore and audio logs as I could.

I wondered how Housemarque struck the balance between the haunting story beats and the funfair light show of being pelted with glowsticks from all sides.

“At Housemarque, we’re gameplay first. So for us, it’s about allowing you to go into the gameplay, and it’s about protecting that flow. With audio logs, we would never make you stay there [and listen to it]. And in general, you can skip every bit of the story if you want.

“That’s kind of really wanting to protect the action flow. But to your point, I love the sort of radio show of hearing a haunting log as you’re dancing between projectiles and absorbing them.”

From the opening couple of hours of the game, Saros’s cast is full of strong performances, with Kohli serving as a complicated, intriguing lead.

“I just think Arjun would not be Arjun without Rahul, and Selene would not be Selene without Jane. PlayStation could connect us with Rahul. And I was there with Harry Krueger. And before we could even pitch the game, Rahul just said, “I’m in. I love Returnal. I love Housemarque. Let’s get it. Let’s do this. What do you want to do?”

“I love the sort of radio show of hearing a haunting log as you’re dancing between projectiles and absorbing them.”

“And then we pitched the full game. We pitched the arc. We pitched everything. And he’s like, yes. He was really in. And he’s been such a tremendous collaborator. He’s a huge gamer. We love talking about games. He’s played a lot of Saros and has given great feedback. And he’s actually really good.   think he’s brought such authenticity, and he’s really pushed the story.”

‘I hope people say this is a bold game’

For Gregory Louden, Simone Silversri, and the rest of Housemarque, the success of Saros won’t be purely judged on its Metacritic score or its raw sales.

Silverstri tells me he “Couldn’t be prouder of [his] team. We worked together so hard to get this to be the absolute best that we can. And now that it’s gonna go out, I am so happy and so excited for it. Of course, there’s always that tiny, little scary thing about it, but I would say I’m like 90% excited, 10 % scared.”

“I read all the comments, I’ll watch what you write, I’ll watch everything. And the thing is, my Mama watches everything as well. So if I miss something, she’s gonna send it,” he shares with a proud smile.

For Louden, he’s well aware of the reputation of the studio and the pressure on his shoulders.

“I think for me, as a creator, I’d love for people to view the game as mysterious, to view the game as being sort of monstrous, and to view it as moving. I hope that people think this is a really unique and special game, the same way Returnal was. I think, to me, that is our success criteria.

“Obviously, Metacritic is wonderful, and sales are wonderful, but I think we’ve set out to create something really bold. I hope people say this is a bold game.”

Saros will be released on PlayStation 5 on April 30.