The first time I came face to face with the Prophet — the big bad of Saros‘ first biome — I had just one thought: “Yeah, I’m screwed.”
I was maybe 20 minutes into the game. I knew nothing. I was getting to grips with dodging and blocking and shooting. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Soltari and a, uh, Saros? Basically, I was a baby. When the Prophet lasered me to death, I blithely accepted my fate. I’ll get ’em next time.
Much like Returnal — Housemarque’s last triple-A outing that blended roguelike elements with the bullet hell gameplay they’re known for — Saros features multiple biomes with procedurally generated levels. Each time you die, the ground shifts, which means you never quite know what to expect with each new run. Some rooms and areas are fixed, but item pickups change completely, and the layout is just different enough to keep you on your toes.
You play as Arjun, a Soltari Enforcer whose crew gets stranded on a colony planet after their ship crashes. Some members of your crew have survived, but the company you work for is more interested in having you gather all the Lucenite you can find, rather than the wellbeing of your compatriots or those that came before you. It’s immediately obvious that Arjun is here for something other than capitalism and lining the pockets of his corporate overlords; a lady companion of his (Wife? Girlfriend?) was on the planet before him, and he will stop at nothing to find her. Even if it means throwing himself at aggressive alien lifeforms under an eclipsed sun over and over again.
The basics of Saros are pretty easy to pick up on. R2 lets you shoot from your gun, holding R1 lets you generate a shield around you that blocks projectiles while tapping it lets you melee, X lets you jump, and L1 lets you dash to avoid laser beams. Learning to dash and shield are crucial here, as these mechanics completely determine whether you live or die in Saros.
The aliens are incredibly aggressive, and surviving in Saros means having to be quick on your feet and immediately recognizing when you should block or dodge. Health pickups are scarce, so you need to be careful, but you want to be somewhat gung-ho too, or you’ll never actually kill anything.
Housemarque doesn’t enjoy the term “bullet hell”, opting instead to describe Saros‘ gameplay as “bullet ballet”, and it makes sense. Trying to balance dodging, blocking, and shooting can be very balletic once you’re locked in and the game puts you in a trance. There’s no ammo to speak of, but your weapons will overheat after a while, forcing you to wait a few seconds before you’re able to shoot again. That is, unless you’re able to hit R2 at just the right time to perform a quick reload to bypass the wait time. And just like Returnal, when you die, you start from the beginning of the biome and try to make it all the way to the end again.
This time around, however, Housemarque completely eases up on the roguelike side of things. Yes, you still lose your weapon upgrades and Artifacts (read: modifiers that come with perks and tradeoffs), but you get to strengthen Arjun in other ways in between runs.
As you gun down your enemies and melee them to death, you’re rewarded with Lucenite, a resource that you can use to unlock permanent upgrades. These upgrades include shorter cooldowns, increased health, increased Lucenite pickups, and even better gear rarity. The first time I died, I was surprised by how much Lucenite I had accrued and immediately put it all into health. This is it, I thought. My health bar’s huge. Nothing can stop me now.
Except, the eclipse can totally stop you.
About halfway through each of the two biomes I saw in Saros, you’ll be forced to trigger an eclipse. During an eclipse, the game’s enemies become much deadlier. Now, they’re able to fire corrupted projectiles at you, which lower your maximum health. Oh, and they’re also more aggressive. Like you needed more things to worry about.
Here’s what’s so genius about the corruption mechanic, though. When you get corrupted, you can cleanse yourself by attacking enemies with a charged weapon attack. You do this by holding down L2 and pressing R2 to fire. But in order to use a charged attack, you need Power, which you get by absorbing enemy projectiles with your shield block. This makes Saros feel incredibly intense as a result, as you essentially need to choose to put yourself in harm’s way to gain Power, then use the slower charged attack to cleanse yourself.
It’s a brilliant way to stop players from simply farming Lucenite and brute forcing their way through a level. That, and you can only unlock so many upgrades until the game eventually walls off the rest behind boss clears.
The second time I faced the Prophet, my maximum health had fallen so low I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting through the first phase. Once I got all the upgrades I could, though, and I finally got a better understanding of how cleansing worked, it was just a matter of time.
When I made it to the Prophet for the third time, I was fully locked in. No more messing around. I was dodging and weaving lasers like I was born to do this thing. I was holding my shield up and bopping around like a lunatic, and spamming R2 whenever I could afford to lift my finger off from R1. I was in full bullet ballet mode.
Victory didn’t come easy, as the Prophet fight plays out in phases, each one more challenging than the last. It came down to the wire as my health slowly drained away and the arena started to close in on me. But there’s no defeating me when I’m in bullet ballet mode. At some point, Saros puts you into a sort of flow state where there’s nothing else in the world that matters except blue, yellow, red, and your pure instincts.
When the Prophet finally went down, I put the controller down, stood up, and got some water. At some point, I’d started involuntarily shaking like I couldn’t believe what I’d just pulled off. Saros is shaping up to be a truly excellent shooter, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
