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Releasing at the end of this month on April 30th 2026, Saros is the newest game from Housemarque, the studio behind PS5 launch title Returnal.
Much like Returnal, Saros is a third person bullet hell shooter roguelite where players venture into an unforgiving world, dodge glowing projectile orbs, and use guns to destroy incoming enemies, resetting their progress upon defeat.
As much as I loved Returnal conceptually, with its beautiful visuals and gripping narrative immediately engaging, I simply found the game too difficult to complete no matter how many runs I attempted, due to the game’s steep difficulty curve and lack of difficulty mitigating tools available for me as a disabled player. I ended up eventually watching the game’s cutscenes on YouTube post release, because I recognised that I was just never going to be able to complete the game myself.
I am pleased to say that I had a much better time mechanically with Saros than I did with Returnal, seeing the credits roll during the review period and continuing to challenge myself playing beyond that point. This is in no small part thanks to a massively shifted focus on making this new adventure more accessible than Returnal.
The general narrative conceit with Saros is that you play Arjun, a corporate employee sent to collect valuable minerals on a remote planet in space. Yours is not the first expedition to have been sent to this planet, and contact with the other previous groups is limited to non-existent. The planet shifts geographically every time it is explored, there’s discrepancies between how long exploration runs are perceived by the character and those staying back at the base, and every time you die you are revived mysteriously in this pool of… I’m not entierly sure what it is.
In terms of accessibility, when first booting up the game a few options are offered to the player during initial setup. These include setting text and audio language, activating subtitles, and setting subtitle size to small, medium, or large. Each subtitle size is previewed during the initial setup menu.
There are unfortunately some moments in the initial narrative cutscene which are not perfectly subtitled. For example, at one point a woman’s voice can be heard, but that dialogue is not subtitled for Deaf or hard of hearing players.
[It’s my fault]
[The sun is Forever]
Once you’re into the game itself you can pause and access the main settings menu, which has a good amount of accessibility options available. Of note, any setting changed from its default value has a small white dot placed next to it, to make it easier to spot which settings you’ve previously altered at a glance.
In the gameplay menu players can set their aim magnetism and aim friction levels separately, controlling how strongly your cursor tracks moving targets and how strongly it assists in aiming initially at enemies. It is important to note that some weapons picked up during runs disable lock on targeting, meaning that some weapons will need accurate manual aiming even with these settings enabled. These weapons are the exception rather than the rule, they’re fairly rare, but they are worth keeping an eye out for, as they’re not always terribly well signposted in advance, with a small popup after you equip one often being the cue that your auto targeting support has just been shut off.
You can also alter a number of HUD elements such as whether enemy health bars and targeting dots are shown. Players can also alter their level of protection from falling, tweak subtitle colours and speaker names, and set subtitle background opacity.
The most important setting in the gameplay menu however is “Unlimited Protection Modifiers” – an incredibly helpful setting, but one whose name is a little misleading.
While not initially available, a few hours in players will unlock a menu where they can apply positive and negative modifiers to their character. Each of these modifiers has a score applied to them, with differing degrees of support having different point values. The idea is that these modifiers need to be relatively balanced, with your positive modifiers not able to outbalance your negative modifiers by more than about 3 points. If you want to add a couple of levels of incoming damage protection to your character, you might pay for that by turning off your ability to gain a rare character upgrade resource while out on runs.
The “Unlimited Protection Modifiers” setting allows you to apply unlimited point values worth of positive modifiers to your character, without having to keep them balanced with points applied to negatives. However, the name isn’t terribly accurate, as the game offers you only 6 slots for positive modifiers, while having 15 potential positive modifiers available. This isn’t the biggest issue in the world in practice, for most players struggling with the game’s difficulty equipping the highest level modifiers for increasing your damage dealt and the one for decreasing incoming damage taken will help immensely with the game’s difficulty, and still leave you with four slots remaining. Still, it feels important to note that you’ll still have to choose between which positive modifiers are important to you, even with this setting active. You can’t turn them all on at once.
This modifier selection menu isn’t initially available in game. For me it didn’t appear until I had made it past the first phase of the game’s first true boss fight. This is obviously going to be a potential accessibility barrier, as if you’re someone who needs a few levels of damage or defense boost to get to this point in the game, you won’t have those tools available to help you get over this initial hurdle. I fully expect there will be some players who could complete Saros who unfortunately may drop off before this accessibility tool is offered to them, if unlocking it is indeed as it appears predicated on progression to and partially through the first boss fight.
In the controller menu players can remap their controls, reduce or disable vibration, trigger effects, and recoil trigger effects, alter their aim speed, tweak stick input minimum and maximum values, and alter the degree of look and aim support offered per axis of movement.
By default while playing the game Secondary Fire modes on weapons are activated by half pressing and holding the L2 trigger, at a point where resistance is felt. When trigger effects are turned off completely you still have to half pull the trigger to activate alternate fire, but you just lose the resistance point to rest against then push past (fully pulling L2 activates a special charged energy blast which we will discuss in a bit).
In the audio menu you’ll find the traditional audio sliders found in most modern games, a toggle to add additional speaker audio for cues including remaining ammo, an option to centre dialogue in the audio mix rather than have it pan from side to side, a high pitched ringing reduction option, and multiple options for tweaking the dynamic range of audio (basically the difference between the quietest and loudest sounds in the mix).
One unique option seen in Saros is the ability to create your own custom dynamic range settings, with a visual graph, to fully customise how much the volume range should vary between different sounds.
In the visuals menu players can disable a bunch of different HUD visual effects, as well as set custom colours for standard projectiles, homing projectiles, corrupted, nova, melee, beams, and energy patterns. Saros unfortunately does not feature a full high contrast mode, there’s no option to highlight enemies or the player in bright block colours, but these customisable colours for projectile effects are still pretty useful.
One aspect of Returnal which made it fairly difficult to complete for some disabled players was the lack of permanent progression between runs. New artifacts and consumables could be unlocked and would appear in the pool for future runs, but otherwise very little existed to help make future runs easier than the last.
Saros by comparison is a lot more forgiving and generous with its meta-progression. Players retain the weapon they ended their prior run with, being able to start the next run with it already equipped, albeit at a reduced rarity level. Players can also access a permanent upgrades skill tree between runs called the Armour Matrix, offering stat buffs and other bonuses that persist between runs. Resources for permanent upgrades are pretty generously offered so it feels like you’re constantly improving your odds of progression, but the skill tree is at times gated by boss completion, meaning there is a ceiling to the amount of upgrade options available until you clear specific challenge points.
Additionally, once an area’s boss is defeated, you can basically ignore that area. You’ll unlock a teleportation option to the next zone of the game, and won’t need to recomplete older areas to regain progression.
Getting into the core gameplay, in Saros players have a number of core tools available to them in combat and traversal. Certain bullets can be blocked and absorbed using a shield, in order to charge up a special arm weapon blast for additional damage. Many types of projectiles can be safely dashed through. Your weapons all have unlimited ammo, but some will fire in unique ways that make them feel like this isn’t the case, such as bullets that lodge in an enemy and cannot be fired again until they return. Some projectiles can be parried back at the enemy, but only specific ones with specific timings. Some enemies are shielded, and will need the player to get in close and do melee damage before they can be harmed.
There’s a whole bunch of other mechanics I’ve yet to mention, but the core point is that while you’ve got a lot of tools at your disposal, the experience can be a little initially overwhelming, particularly when paired with how many bullets are being fired at you constantly.
In terms of navigation accessibility, I love that both the main and mini maps are always clear about which paths lead to story progression, and which lead to optional side areas. By default blue flags are progress, and white flags optional areas. That system is great, and I wish more games had similar options.
Additionally, any time you accidentally walk off a ledge, time slows down for a moment and you’re prompted to press the dash button in order to automatically dash back onto solid ground. This is a really nice tool, and it saved me a lot of frustration when accidently walking off edges while trying to strafe around bulletfire.
In most areas there will come a point where you have to enter The Eclipse, a version of the level where certain changes occur that alter your progression options. While in this version of each level upgrades that previously would have been purely beneficial now come with a negative trade off if you accept them. Enemies become stronger, but they drop better rewards. Damage dealt to the player can reduce their maximum health, but absorbing bullets with your shield and activating your charged blast attack can regain that corrupted portion of your health bar.
There’s also optional side areas called “nightmare strands”. Clearly marked, these teleport you to a high challenge combat area which, if survived, will reward the player with large amounts of meta progression resources. Making use of the “unlimited positive modifiers” setting doesn’t lock you out from attempting these challenge areas.
One small area of accessibility critique – One of the optional tools you can unlock while playing is an optional once per run revival, coming back from death with a partial healthbar. Unfortunately at least one fight in the game disables access to this mechanic, long after it is introduced. I understand the narrative purpose, but I would love an accessibility option for players to be able to keep access to that revival during that fight.
In terms of visual performance, while Saros hits a locked 60FPS pretty much flawlessly on PS5 Pro, the game’s performance is far more inconsistent on the base PS5, at least in late game areas with more projectiles present at once. The game doesn’t feature a performance or graphics mode toggle on either system, and unfortunately feels like it was designed first and foremost for the Pro console owner experience, not built for the base hardware and then scaled up for the Pro users. Admittedly it looks phenomenal on PS5 Pro if you have that hardware, but I was honestly surprised by the performance difference when switching to playing on the base system.
As someone who has attempted to play through Returnal many times over the years without success, ultimately watching cutscenes online to see the rest of the plot, I had very little trouble seeing the credits roll on Saros during the review period. The increased meta-progression options, improved aim and tracking assistance features, and the option to give myself a few damage and defense buffs without balancing them out with debuffs made a huge difference to my ability to play through Housemarque’s newest release.
I was able to get Saros to a place where it was difficult, but possible for me to complete. Knowing that each run I completed was at least slightly improving my stats, and that I had more drastic buffs available if I temporarily needed them, allowed me to make the experience challenging but completable.
Saros has a really interesting story, great enemy variety, and feels really wonderful to progress through. As visually overstimulating as it can be at times, managing to narrowly tiptoe past damage and then strike down a towering boss feels amazing. I’ve always theoretically loved the kinds of games that Housemarque makes, and it’s really nice that I can finally complete one on my own terms, and climb the summit of its challenges.
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