With Saros, Housemarque makes a case for doing next-gen gaming differently

It is generally unacceptable to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of sayings that discourage this – books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a danger. If one puts disproportionate effort into how something looks, said work can be considered superficial. But in the world of big budget video games? That’s how you win.

Visual fidelity is the video game’s shorthand for progression: how accurately a mountain is displayed, how dynamic the snow behaves, and how the player character raises his hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it. This quest can get ridiculous, as evidenced by Rockstar Games’ compulsion To move the horse’s testicles Response to ambient temperature in 2018 Red Dead Redemption 2. It also has nothing to do with anything the player does. This is where Housemarque differs from its peers.

The Finnish developer is an oddball on PlayStation Studios’ roster. The store was acquired by Sony in 2021 and was known for its arcade games such as Super Stardust HD and risogontwin-stick shooters and shooters that take advantage of contemporary hardware to make their bullet hells feel more like bullet heaven, filled with pyrotechnics and lasers that are vividly rendered but in the service of gaming in the tradition of Asteroids or Defender. It would be fine if it didn’t look as sharp, but it’s great that it does.

Saros, The studio’s latest gameworks on a similar principle. He loves Returning, Housemarque debuts in 2021 on PlayStation Studiosanother arcade-style classic reimagined from the perspective of Sony mates like God of war or Horizon. It aspires to dramatic storytelling and lavish presentation but without the obsessive pursuit of realism that can define the conversation around those games.

“For me, realism is not interesting,” he says. Saros Lead artist Simone Silvestri. “Saros It is a stylized and realistic game, which ensures that we can conquer the world with our crazy gameplay. The level of detail we want is very intentional, very controlled, so that we can create art for the game. I think that’s why we then have more space to fall in love with the devices as much as we do.

in SarosThe player assumes the role of Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli), a member of a team sent to the planet Carcosa to investigate the disappearance of mining colonists sent to harvest a miracle mineral called Lucite. Something happened to them, and something is currently happening to Arjun, and he is in this confused state Saros It starts. If a player wants to discover any of these, they must first learn how to play Housemarque’s skillful, arcade-like style of action games.

It is a similar approach to Returningan alternate universe in which AAA video games are less interested in cinematic realism and more interested in escalating gameplay, engaging in an arms race for ludicrous sports. Across these two games, Housemarque posits another way to be “next-gen” and push the standard forward, one that relies not on the pursuit of realism but on using the entire gameplay cow, so to speak.

“The first reference for our games is our own games,” he says. Saros Director and co-writer Gregory Lowden. “We’ll have story moments that are really special for you, but they’ll be really rewarding. You’ll own them, so I’m not giving them away for free. We’ll also have our cinematics revolve around the questions. The gameplay is the answer. So a lot of times, cinematics are focused on setting things up or asking questions for you to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”

in Returning and Saroscomputing power is used not only to craft detailed environments, but to fill the screen with orbs of different colors, to use instantaneous loading times as a way to emphasize each game’s dizzying cycle of death and rebirth, to bombard the player with impossibly fast creatures, and to arm them with weapons that defy physics and give unique haptic feedback. The environments are full of writhing plants that are always moving, sometimes waiting to ensnare the player, embodying a sense of psychological or cosmic dread. To reflect the inner hell experienced by the player character – a middle-aged woman and an Indian man Returning and SarosRespectively, they are both woefully unusual in the world of video game heroes – trapped.

This is also Housemarque’s philosophy: visual fidelity actually has little to do with the immersive experience that many games so insistently strive for through graphical prowess. “Immersion does not come from realism,” Silvestri says. “It comes from the authenticity of the sensations and feelings you have in this moment.”

This is in keeping with Louden’s goal of telling action stories that don’t start with the melodrama of a typical video game scene. Housemarque’s PlayStation Studios-era games aim to make you think about the characters you embody by playing with them, but the trap of being a “gameplay-first” studio (as Housemarque describes itself) is that players may only think about that gameplay, not its narrative implications. Saros and Returning They each have a couple of ingenious tricks to counter this, each asking the player to make devilish bargains as they make their way through a live iteration of the run. ReturningThis small-scale attempt included parasites, which would attach to protagonist Selene and provide an advantage that comes with a gameplay swap. Saros It does so with upgrades suffering from “Corruption,” a mysterious disease that infects everything in the game.

The player doesn’t have to think deeply about any of this, but the installment is compelling, a Mobius strip of gameplay and character that gives Housemarque’s “bullet ballet” a layer of psychological depth.

“We’re creating a character that you can examine and study,” Lowden says. “And not just one: we have many characters (in Saros) with many competing goals, all trying to find their way forward. Many of them leave nothing behind to come to this strange, hostile planet. They know it’s hostile when they go there. They know they are leaving behind their past, but they are all going there for a new future. What happens when the future isn’t what you want it to be?

SarosConfronting a hostile future that is different from what is expected is an apt metaphor for the studio. Housemarque remains unusual among AAA developers, even now Saros It makes some concessions to a more welcoming experience ReturningGiven the film’s notorious difficulty, it remains an odd duck among its sister studios and their focus on cinematic sprawl. Different is a good thing, but in the world of popular and very expensive video games, it is also risky.

Not only do these games need to sell themselves, they also need to sell the console they use. This makes risk a responsibility. Because people actually judge a book by its cover.