It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this — books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That’s how you win.
Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit can become absurd, as illustrated by Rockstar Games’ compulsion to animate horse testicles responding to ambient temperature in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. It also has very little to do with anything a player, well, does. This is where Housemarque diverges from its peers.
The Finnish developer is an oddball in the PlayStation Studios roster. Acquired by Sony in 2021, the shop was known for arcade games like Super Stardust HD and Resogun, twin-stick shooters and shoot-’em-ups that leverage contemporary hardware to make their bullet hells appear more like bullet heavens, full of fireworks and lasers vibrantly rendered but in the service of games in the tradition of Asteroids or Defender. They’d be good if they didn’t look as sharp, but it’s cool that they did.
Saros, the studio’s latest game, operates on a similar principle. Like Returnal, Housemarque’s 2021 PlayStation Studios debut, it’s another classic arcade-style game reimagined from the perspective of Sony labelmates like God of War or Horizon. It has an eye for dramatic genre storytelling and lavish presentation but without the obsessive pursuit of realism that can define conversation around those games.
“To me, realism is not interesting to pursue,” says Saros lead artist Simone Silvestri. “Saros is a stylized, realistic game, which makes sure that we can bend the world to the crazy gameplay that we have. The level of detail that we want is very intentional, very controlled, so that we can make canvases for the gameplay. I think that’s why we then get a lot more leeway to fall in love with the hardware as much as we do.”
In Saros, the player assumes the role of Arjun Devraj (performed by actor Rahul Kohli), a member of a team sent to the planet Carcosa to investigate the disappearance of mining colonists sent to harvest a miracle mineral called Lucenite. Something happened to them, and something is currently happening to Arjun, and it’s in this disorienting state that Saros begins. If the player wants to figure any of this out, first they have to learn how to play Housemarque’s dextrous, arcade-like approach to action games.
It’s an approach that’s similar to Returnal, an alternate universe in which AAA video games are less interested in cinematic verisimilitude and more interested in escalating gameplay, engaging in an arms race for ludic athleticism. Across these two games, Housemarque posits another way of being “next-gen” and pushing the benchmark forward, one not predicated on the pursuit of photorealism but on using the whole gameplay cow, so to speak.
“A lot of the time the cinematics are about setting things up or giving you questions to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”
”The number one reference for our games are our own games,” says Saros director and co-writer Gregory Louden. “We are gonna have really special story moments for you, but they’re gonna be really rewarding. You are gonna own them, so I’m not gonna give them away for free. We’re also gonna make our cinematics about questions. The gameplay is the answer. So a lot of the time the cinematics are about setting things up or giving you questions to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”
In Returnal and Saros, computing power isn’t just used to craft detailed environments, but to fill the screen with orbs of different colors, to use the instantaneous load times as a way to underline each game’s dizzying cycle of death and rebirth, to overwhelm the player with impossibly swift creatures, and arm them with weapons that defy physics and give unique haptic feedback. Environments are full of writhing flora that is always in motion, sometimes waiting to ensnare the player, to embody a feeling of psychological or cosmic horror. To reflect whatever internal hell the player character — a middle-aged woman and an Indian man in Returnal and Saros, respectively, both woefully unusual in the world of video game protagonists — is trapped in.
This is also the Housemarque philosophy: Visual fidelity actually has very little to do with the immersiveness that many games doggedly pursue via graphical prowess. “Immersion does not come from realism,” Silvestri says. “It comes from the believability of the sensations and the feelings that you have in the moment.”
This aligns with Louden’s goal of kinetic storytelling that doesn’t start with the melodrama of the typical video game cutscene. Housemarque’s PlayStation Studios-era games aim to get you thinking about the characters you embody through playing as them, but the trap of being a “gameplay-first” studio (as Housemarque describes itself) is that players may only consider that gameplay, and not its narrative implications. Saros and Returnal each have a couple deft tricks for confronting this, each asking the player to make devil’s bargains as they work their way through the live-die-repeat of a run. Returnal’s small-scale attempt involved parasites, which would attach themselves to protagonist Selene and provide a perk that came with a gameplay tradeoff. Saros does this with upgrades that suffer from “Corruption,” a mysterious affliction that infects everything in the game.
“What happens when the future isn’t what you want it to be?”
The player doesn’t have to think too deeply about any of this, but the nudge is compelling, a Mobius strip of gameplay and character that gives the “bullet ballet” that Housemarque has choreographed a layer of psychological depth.
“We’re creating a character that you can examine and study,” says Louden. “And not just one: We have many characters [in Saros] with many competing goals, all trying to find their way forward. Many of them are leaving something to come to this hostile alien planet. They know that it’s hostile when they go there. They know they’re leaving their past, but they’re all going there for a new future. What happens when the future isn’t what you want it to be?”
Saros’ confrontation with a hostile future that’s different from what’s expected is an apt metaphor for the studio. Housemarque remains atypical among AAA developers, and while Saros offers some concessions to a more welcoming experience than Returnal’s notorious difficulty, it is still an odd duck among its sister studios and their emphasis on cinematic sprawl. Different is good, but in the high-stakes, expensive realm of blockbuster video games, it’s also risky.
These are games that don’t just need to sell themselves, they need to sell the console they’re on. That makes risky a liability. Because people do, in fact, judge a book by its cover.
