Aftermath's two orb sickos, Gita and Chris, have been playing Saros nonstop since it was released. They sat down to chat about the filmic and literary influences on its vibe, it's many colliding systems, and of course, Rahul Kohli.
Gita Jackson: Hi Chris! We're both playing the critically acclaimed Rahul Kohli simulator, Saros, and I have been unable to think of anything else since it dropped. I was a full on Returnal sicko and have been pumped for another Housemarque game basically since I played that one. This game... is both not quite what I expected and exactly what I want to play, and I'm still untangling my feelings about it. What about you Chris? Were you a Returnal guy? What were you bringing into the experience of playing Saros?
Chris Person: I am a Housemarque guy generally which encompasses Returnal as well. I really loved Resogun and Super Stardust HD, and Sektori is by a Housemarque veteran as well. They love orbs, and I simply gotta respect that.
I cleared the game and I am happy to say they did it again.
Gita: I am not nearly as far into the game as you, but I'm about at the place where it starts throwing systems at you rapid fire and it starts to make more sense how to glide between them. It's not too dissimilar from Returnal, another orb heavy game, but it's just a lot, A LOT more generous.
Like I just got to the place where the "artefacts" I pick up—beneficial traits that can be "corrupted" and also come with a downside like taking fall damage or losing currency when you get hit—can gain a "volatility." I just wanna take a moment and congratulate Housemarque on the various verbs and nouns they've chosen for the game, real fun stuff to roll around in your head.
Chris: Many designers are content to just name stats "Strength", "Intelligence", "Dexterity." Cowardly. You need to give them vague, slightly obtuse names like Command, Integrity, Drive and have those get corrupted into Arrogance, Ignorance and Negligence.
There are so many interlocking systems in this game. You get corrupted artefacts when you activate the terrifying eclipse, but they get stronger and can be cleansed after the fact. It's all there but the game doesn't tell you some things directly.
Gita: I love that whenever you get hit by a lot corrupted orbs you start sprouting a little wing off your shoulder and it's like, goopy like resin. Shit rules.
Saros is a game about a ship of paramilitary operators from a massive corporation crash landing on the planet Carcosa to try to find the remnants of a colony ship that landed there and was lost. In the meantime, everyone goes insane, and that really is the bulk of its plot.
Chris: I think there were like three ships.
Gita: It was a real corporate fuck up. They sent one ship, then another, and then one more to be sure, and then the Enforcers.
You know the capitalist motto: if at first it doesn't work, try two more times.
Now, Carcosa comes from the stories of The Yellow King, which originated from speculative fiction writer Robert W. Chambers in 1895, about a play that turns people crazy when they read it. The original stories are all in the public domain now and are great reads, but everyone really knows Carcosa from True Detective.
Chris: Which is annoying because I know it from the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu games first. Whenever Hastur shows up you know you are in for a good time. All of the Great Old Ones will make you go crazy but Hastur has fun with you first.
Gita: If you have a chance to read the Repairer of Reputations by Chambers, definitely do so. But the literary allusions aren't super well developed in the game IMO. It's more about setting a mood and a tone. And the tone is this: everything is going to go wrong.
Chris: They really just use it as a jumping off point and make it their own thing, particularly near the end, which I really prefer. There are certain commonalities like The Yellow Sign and The King In Yellow and Carcosa but they don't feel tethered to it in a one to one way which is kinda nice.
It's also very Event Horizon.
Gita: Oh is it EVER Event Horizon. What a flick. It's basically every really good scary story about the vast reaches of space and the paranoia of being alone. Just the whole vibe of it—I love the slimy arm that grabs you when you summon the eclipse, the rising drone of guitar chords when you get closer and closer to the eclipse device, the enigmatic shots of an almost kiss, the wind blowing curtains away from a window, an unmade bed, all of which go unexplained but have meaning that you can feel just under the surface.
And then on top of that, the game just absolutely fucking rips from back to front. Every time I start a new run I want it to last forever. I think much has been made about this game being "easier" than Returnal, and I'm not sure that that's true. It's just that they give you more tools to approach the difficulty with. For example, both of us do runs starting from the very first biome now, instead of the most recent level. It just makes you feel like a god.
Chris: They really have quite a lot of fun with how this game looks. Sometimes it's like Tarsem Signh, sometimes it's The Machines from The Matrix, sometimes it's DOOM and sometimes it's a city meant to look like Rodin's The Gates Of Hell made entirely out of suffering alien creatures.
It's extremely Finnish-coded if you know what that means. The UI looks like Wipeout, there's a lot of orbs, the systems are obtuse but interlocking in ways that make sense, and there's a commitment to doing really creative things with rendering. My favorite effect is a bit where they make a giant hologram out of sand or smoke and you can shoot your gun through it. Also, no company has nailed haptics or the adaptive triggers quite like Housemarque. This game feels like popping bubble wrap. When you throw a shield up to absorb orbs and it popopopops, it itches a deep, reptile part of your brain.
Gita: Oh my god, the way this game uses every single part of the Dualsense controller is just wild. I thought I wasn't going to be able to handle the "alt fire" mode, where you pull the left trigger halfway to activate a secondary firing mode, but it actually makes total sense once you start playing with it, because the haptics are so precise.
Chris: It definitely drains the controller battery a bit, which has been making me really appreciate the Steam Controller having a 35 hour battery life.
Gita: Oh I was wondering why my controllers kept dying halfway through a run lmao
But speaking of the guns: also every single gun in this game feels fantastic. Bungie level of quality with making each weapon feel unique and powerful. But also I love that fucking Repeater Crossbow, that thing is just NASTY.
I love the shotgun that you can turn sideways. I love the handcanon that can shoot a big bomb. I love the shotgun that's also a grenade launcher. And I really, REALLY love the auto rifle.
Chris: The Smart Rifle is probably my favorite gun in the game because it melts everything it touches. The Repeater Crossbow is also good if you are attempting to clear out a nightmare strand or something because you can blind fire it into an area with the secondary and it just auto tracks to every enemy in the game. I like that the ability to auto target enemies is a function of the weapon and that the highest DPS output guns don't have that.
Also it took me way too long to realize using power weapons gets rid of corruption.
Gita: Man I also love the power weapons! Well, mostly I love Prominence, which is just a rocket launcher, basically. I ended up with a build with the Repeater Crossbow with power generator on it, so every time I killed anything with the bow it charged my power weapon, meaning I was firing that rocket like five times a minute.
So every time you pick up a weapon you raise your Proficiency level, meaning each new weapon is more powerful than the last. That was one of the runs where I was going from the first biome, so my proficiency was like low 40s and I was just melting everything in my path.
Chris: Yeah, the game allows you to start from the very beginning of the game every time and make a run to the end so that you're massively overpowered by the time you hit whatever boss you are currently on. They mix it up by making the map fork in a few places so you don't just go through the game in one go, but if you are having difficulty it is a viable option. Some people are "only start on the biome you are on" people but the thing I enjoy about it is that it gives you the latitude to do either and your choice is between you and god.
They struck a nice balance between making the game accessible to more players and punishing to people who enjoy that sort of thing. I've seen some people say it's too easy but I would suggest they grow up a little.
Gita: The game can also become harder. As soon as I opened it up, I saw the influence that Hades has had on the roguelike genre, and not just because it has a narrative that develops the more you visit the hub world. If the game isn't challenging enough, you can also take on "Carcosan Modifiers" that make the run even harder—more damage, less currency, etc. I have only played with these a little bit because for me the pleasure isn't difficulty as much as... dodging orbs, shooting gun, hitting that absolute state of flow where you act before you think and never get hit.
Chris: The one thing I enjoy more than punishing difficulty is breaking a game's spine like Bane. If you get really disgusting with modifiers and do a full run from biome one by the end of it every interaction is like you set of the Trinity test every time you enter a room. It reminds me of high level Stranger of Paradise DLC play where it's just inscrutable to an outside observer.
If people saw the modifiers I use they'd fucking hurl.
Gita: Okay, lay it on me. What's your ideal build. I am partial to the bow or a smart rifle, with as many command modifiers as I can possibly get, and then spamming the rocket launcher power weapon because I figured out if you hit a boss with the power weapon at the right time, it breaks their attack pattern and you can get in like three more hits.
Chris: Maximizing the amount of Lucenite and the ability to snag it is great because in addition to it being money, it also increases your proficiency meaning you level up faster each run. Conversely, by the end of the game you have so much Lucenite that it's a joke, so reducing the amount of Lucenite you take home each time is fine. I'll also take a hit on corruption because if I'm playing right and spamming power weapons it doesn't really matter. A lot of times I do Artefact Immunity just because I don't like having to do a cost/benefit analysis every time I pick something up, and it lets you spam the eclipse earlier. Hostile Death Projectiles you get later and that's a gimmie. Artefact Destruction also helps you because after a few biomes you have so many artefacts that you don't know what to do with them. I also add whatever damage and defense modifiers I can slam in there. Overlord Restoration is good as insurance for certain bosses.
Gita: Overlord Restoration is an easy way to get through tricky bosses if you find yourself totally depleted after trying to run through a level. I haven't thought about Artefact Immunity because I do like the cost benefit analysis but it is annoying to keep skipping good artefacts because they have dash cooldown or fall damage, the two things I'll never, ever pick up.
Chris: Also, don't be afraid to test volatility. Though the drawbacks can be bad in practice they are workable. Like the Health one makes it so you are blind to enemy bars but that only matters if you care about how much health an enemy has.
Gita: Right, if you're just an explosion machine, that doesn't matter.
Chris: How much health an enemy has is none of my business, frankly.
I will say without getting too much into spoilers territory, I like Arjun a lot, partially because he fucking sucks. There's a million PlayStation-adjacent pissed guys with father issues, I don't think it's as interesting a trope as writers think it is, but if you're going to do that the guy had better be a piece of work.
Gita: I mean it's obvious from the beginning that he sucks a lot, right? He is OBSESSED with a woman he hasn't heard from in years. A lot of the narrative turns of the story is a rehash of Spec Ops: The Line, but not in an annoying or overly scolding way. It feels like the correct match between the gameplay and the story, in that the better you get the more deadly you become, and the deeper and deeper you fall into Carcosa, with all that entails.
The whole text of how the Echelon colony fell to the madness of Carcosa is a bit of fun—nothing as impactful as the hag-like wailing of Selene as she succumbs to the horrors of her own life in Returnal. But it's also well acted and realized by all the players here, so I'm not mad if it's not giving me the emotional gut punch that I got from a much bleaker, much less forgiving game.
It's nice to have a game remind me of some good books and movies that don't often get referenced in games, though.
Chris: Also Rahul Kohli kills it. I would let him read the phone book to me if those still existed.
Chris Person
