It is natural to be upset with the current generation of consoles: the end of exclusive video games, the low flow of releases if we do not count remakes, remasters and othre rehashes or the general price increase in hardware that has been unprecedented in the industry. However, two of my most special moments with this generation, and more specifically with PlayStation 5 They were provided to me by the same video game: Returnal.
The first has to be my initial game, with which I discovered one of the best video games of the last five years. If you add the frenzy of the shootings, the great feeling at the controls, the powerful technical level and how Housemarque used fragmented narrative to tell a story within a genre as unfavorable for this as the roguelike, the equation does not fail. And the second was when I reinstalled the title due to the “infinite” mode update, The Tower of Sisyphus, and I rediscovered the benefits of the Finnish studio’s work.
That would be enough for me to really want to Saros when it comes out at the end of next April. Hell, even a studio veteran has pulled off a title as good as Sector. But I also believe that Housemarque is making the right decisions so that Saros is an evolution.
Because the objective must be maintain the speed of the meetings and how you end up developing muscle memory to play on impulse and not so much by conscientious planning. On this matter, Housemarque made a declaration of intent with the original Saros advertisement, the one that ended with the protagonist’s pupil reflecting, as if in a mirror, a barrage of the characteristic projectiles that we already faced in Returnal.
But it would be like living under a rock to think that everything in Returnal was perfect, especially for Sony and PlayStation. The title It didn’t sell like one of the big franchises of the company and it would even be reasonable to attribute it to the demanding gameplay, how much closer it was to the Roguelike than the Roguelite and to that very special narrative, but which was perhaps less accessible to the general public. They have responded to all of this from the studio.
To begin with, the first thing we learned about Saros was its motto: “Come back stronger“, “Come back stronger” in Spanish. With this it is clear that after each defeat there will be the possibility of improving in a much more direct way our abilities, something that was more subtle in Returnal and that depended more on learning to play well than on empowering the protagonist.
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