Returnal, Housemarque’s last major title, wasn’t for the faint of heart, and while Saros, its spiritual successor, offers plenty of new quality of life features, it isn’t shirking from offering a challenge. Following the gameplay overview from the last State of Play, the development team discussed new additions like The Passage.
This is where protagonist Arjun Devraj can unlock permanent upgrades, including Second Chance to revive on death, Attribute Growth to increase max armor integrity, shields and Lucenite gains, and more. However, associate design director Matti Häkli explains that it’s “definitely still challenging, and the whole goal with the permanent progression isn’t to trivialize the game. It’s just offering more agency. Games of a different kind of ways to adjust the challenge of the game.
“The usual solution is to offer a normal difficulty, an easy difficulty, and a hard difficulty. But we wanted to take another route. We wanted to have this all grounded in the game world.” Hence, the Carcosan modifiers, with Protections offering an advantage or mitigating otherwise difficult conditions, while Trials increase the difficulty. There’s even an option to disable most permanent unlocks if you’re seeking a greater challenge. Everything must be in proper balance, though.
Another new feature is the ability to teleport to previously unlocked biomes, whether it’s to continue where you last left off, discover Halcyon materials for upgrading, or discover audio, holo and text logs. Like Returnal, new abilities can open up brand new areas, but if you want to run through and farm materials to become stronger, that’s also an option.
Saros launches on April 30th for PS5, and thus far, it’s shaping up to be so much more than its predecessor. Check out the PS5 features trailer here to learn more about how it leverages DualSense and more for increased immersion.
