Sweating, bullets

SAROS

From: Sony / Housemarque

For: PS5

★★★★

I hate run-backs.

You know the deal — there’s some boss somewhere that’s likely to kill you a bunch of times, but rather than put the restart point immediately before that fight so you can just jump back into it, the developers maddeningly choose to put it further back so you have to run repeatedly through the same two- or five- or 10-minute (I want to throw the controller at this point) sequence of the game just to earn the chance to get killed again.

So Housemarque managing to get me to have a good time with Saros — a game that is almost entirely run-backs — is some pretty good going.

The Finnish studio has made a bit of name for itself in that stressful dimension known as bullet hell, from early titles like the stylish platformer Outland to the more recent, early-PS5-era third-person shooter hit Returnal. Saros draws heavily from Returnal’s playbook — so heavily in fact that it doesn’t seem unfair to call it a sequel, despite having an entirely new plot, setting, and characters. Call it a spiritual sequel — or maybe same shoot, different day.

As players we’re inhabiting the fancy futuristic armour of Arjun Devraj (played in voice and likeness by British actor Rahul Kohli), who has arrived on the planet of Carcosa as a security expert in Echelon IV, an emergency reserve unit sent in with the job of finding out what the heck has happened to the missing Echelons I-III — who were supposed to have established a colony on the the planet in order to exploit an energy-rich, sci-fi-magic substance called lucenite.

As anyone who’s up to date on their 19th century short stories or watched the first season of True Detective may already have guessed though, the planet of Carcosa has got a few unusual things going on, and madness and violence creep in among Arjun and his crew. While his shipmates grow increasingly weird and paranoid back at a safe(ish) home base, Arjun ventures out to confront the hostile Carcosan environment and try to find someone, anyone — with the hint of a more personal motivation driving him as well.

Out amid the space-gothic, eldritch-y vibes of the planet — all crumbling alien ruins and contorted many-limbed statues — Arjun hoofs it around randomised map sections at about 40kmh, blasting, blocking and dodging as various bio-mechanical horrors spew colourful clumps of projectiles in his direction.

In defeat, he finds himself mysteriously beamed back to home base to give it all another go. Guide him all the way through an entire section and the boss fight at the end of it in a single run, though, and you’ll unlock a teleport to jump straight to the beginning of the next level from home.

So the action is all very Returnal, but there’s a few refinements to make the ol’ triple-A gaming experience that much more buttery smooth. Returnal’s dash-evade is joined by a shield Arjun can activate instantly and, a little later on, the ability to parry shots back at enemies. The key here though is that incoming fire is colour-coded in a sort of rock-paper-scissors system; you can shield-block blue bolts, but not yellow; you can parry red shots, but not blue. Getting into the flow of dashing, blocking and parrying is key to staying alive.

Saros also eschews its predecessor’s brutal difficulty for more generous permanent upgrades and checkpoints and a custom tuner that lets you tweak various aspects of the game with a points system, so if you’re truly stuck, you can have a fiddle under the hood and see if it helps. Carcosa also regularly comes under the sway of its weird solar eclipse, toughening up enemies, enabling their yellow ‘‘corruption’’ projectiles that chip away at your max health and boosting but also adding penalties to in-run upgrades. Sometimes you must activate this to proceed, but at other times it’s an option, adding a bit more variety and a risk-reward factor to the equation.

And at this point, Housemarque are old pros at delivering battles that will end with you finding yourself perched on the very front of the couch, clutching the controller in a sweaty death grip; each time the game barricades you in an area is a moment of panicked anticipation. Boss fights are particularly memorable, some filling the screen with so many bullets that it looks like a fireworks display, something that seems unfair and impossible to survive — until it clicks that it isn’t. People watching you play may say ‘‘wow’’. It is immensely satisfying to (eventually) emerge from these encounters triumphant.

If we’re getting picky, some of the guns Arjun gets access to are barely worth bothering with, and the story is up and down; there’s some intrigue and good stuff around themes of obsession, but also ‘‘surprises’’ you’ll see coming from the South Pole, and it all hinges on that weird, video-gamey style of storytelling where no-one asks any of the obvious questions or behaves remotely sensibly. And of course, there’s no getting around it: those bosses and their death blossoms will kill you dead, and then you’re looking at a 20-minute effort just to get back to them killing you dead again.

But if an avowed run-back hater can enjoy this nerve-shredding blast anyway, maybe you can too.

- Ben Allen