Housemarque Has Made PS5 Exclusive Saros Kinder in Response to Returnal Feedback — but It’s Still Fundamentally Difficult

Saros, the upcoming PS5 exclusive from Housemarque, will launch with auto-saves enabled and multiple save slots available, something the studio’s previous game, Returnal, was criticised for not including at its release.

The roguelike shooter starring Rahul Kohli as Arjun Devraj arrives on April 30, and, while it still poses a similar level of challenge in its action as its predecessor, it does come packed with some added kindness, with the developer taking feedback from Returnal on board when designing Saros.

“I think the lesson we learned from Returnal was that people really loved what we created, and we were going on the right track,” says Saros’ creative director, Gregory Louden. “But I think the feedback we did get is that more players wanted to love Returnal; they wanted to get further. So for us, it was about providing that ability. So it means we don’t dilute the challenge; there’s still a very challenging game there, but there is also the ability to kind of modify the challenge.”

That means the addition of several new helpful ways to ease the difficulty of your adventure, including permanent upgrades, second chance revive mechanics, and “Carcosan Modifiers” — a series of toggleable options that can decrease or increase the challenge that Saros’ alien world poses.

But the fundamentals of being able to abandon a run if you need to stop playing for a while, and then come back to pick up where you left off, will be a welcome piece of news for players still scarred by Returnal’s launch, which required you to play through lengthy runs without the possibility of pausing. This option was later patched in in response to player feedback, though.

Additional quality of life details launching with Saros include that each run through this roguelike is designed to last a maximum of around 30 minutes. In fact, during my recent three hours hands-on with the game, most of mine ended up being closer to 20.

“It’s a challenging experience, but every time someone dies, we want them to bring something out of it, right?” says associate design director, Mitja Roskaric. “Even if it’s not the resource that they will use to level up, maybe it is a lesson from that run. And if it’s a short run, I think it’s easier to get more and more lessons in a frequent cadence, right? So I think the 30-minute session lengths that we have are kind of the sweet spot for this kind of experience.

Also included is the ability to have more than one save game on the go. “One thing I thought personally is having multiple save slots,” reveals Roskaric. “So with Returnal, I always had to clear my saves to start over. Now we have a couple of them available from the get- go, so I can have multiple runs of the game at the same time. It was very, very critical for us. I know lives are busy, right? So being able to drop the controller and resume the game at any point, it’s very critical to this experience.”

Saros arrives exclusively on PlayStation 5 on April 30. Are you planning on playing, and do these inclusions at launch make you more excited to jump in? Let us know in the comments!

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.