12 Things To Know Before You Start Playing Saros

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Saros is out for everyone on April 30, but if you bought the PS5 game’s $80 Digital Deluxe Edition, you can play Housemarque’s roguelike shooter right now. The game is tough at the outset, but it doesn’t have to have you tearing out your hair like Returnal did. Here are a few tips to help you make your way through the terrors of Carcosa.

Try to go back to the Passage as much as you can

It’s weird to say that skillfully blazing through Saros might actually be a detriment to your experience, but the game’s narrative structure does make it worth going back to your base of operations at least a few times during each zone. I’m in the middle of my second playthrough of Saros right now, and since I know the game better this time around, I’ve been zipping through the early segments without dying, and as such, I haven’t been going back to the Passage as much as my first playthrough. Each time you return to your team’s hideout, you’ll have new conversations with your teammates, text and audio logs to find, and some changes to the environment that communicate things happening in the story. It’s an odd problem to have, but since the game uses death as a narrative tool, it does feel like a chunk of the narrative is either missing or skipped over if you’re staying alive. Maybe you’ll die enough naturally to end up back in the Passage?

The alternate path is almost always worth it

Throughout Saros, pathways will be marked on your minimap with either a blue flag to designate that going this direction will progress the run, or a white flag that marks alternate paths. In these paths you’ll usually find upgrades, healing items, or drops to change your loadout. Typically there’s not a ton of danger down these routes, so you lose nothing but time going there and seeing if you can find anything useful. Even if you’re content with your loadout and don’t need healing, it’s almost always worth taking a little detour to check every nook and cranny.

If you’re quick, it’s possible to get multiple rewards in booby-trapped rooms

Saros will often have you make a quick decision between one of two perks by slowly lowering gates or bridges that lead to a passageway containing items. In some of these cases, you do have to make a decision and you won’t have time to grab both. However, depending on the layout of the room, it’s sometimes possible to quickly pick up an item on one path and then dash to the other before you lose access to it. These rooms will always have an accessible exit, so you lose nothing by trying: If you don’t make it through the second path, you’ll still be able to make your way out.

Clear corruption before grabbing a healing item, but be mindful

When Arjun takes hits from “corrupted” projectiles, it will lower his base health, so even if you pick up a healing item you can’t regain it. You clear this from your life bar by firing off your more powerful weapons that you gain ammunition for through collecting Power. So when enemies are using corrupted attacks, actually recovering your health requires a funky order of operations that has you cleansing corruption and then grabbing healing items. However, weigh if the healing item would actually surpass your current corruption, as otherwise you’ll be firing off a powerful weapon into the sky for nothing when you could instead have it ready for the next fight. Still, if you see one of the larger healing items in the wild, it’s probably worth clearing the corruption for so you’re not wasting valuable healing resources.

Arjun packs a punch

Melee attacks are inherently more risky than gunfire, and Saros primarily tutorializes Arjun’s punch as a tool for breaking through shields. However, don’t discount how good hand-to-hand combat can be in a scrap. Arjun’s melee attacks can not only take out shields, but also do enough damage to one-shot some lower level enemies, including nuisances such as the worm-like turret creatures that can pester you while you’re trying to handle monsters with bigger HP pools. A well-timed fist does more damage than bullets sometimes, so it works both as a last resort as enemies are getting in close, and as a quick way to take out enemies pestering you while you’re shooting at some pesky flying bastard.

Stationary damage nerf is negligible

Just a quick rule of thumb: if an artifact powerup has a drawback that will lower your damage output when you’re stationary, take it anyway. You should not be stationary in Saros.

You don’t always have to activate the Eclipse

Saros will periodically have you activate an Eclipse that will make enemies stronger and your rewards greater. You do this by interacting with mechanisms that look like several arms sprouting from the ground, and early on, doing this is presented as the only way for you to make progress in one of the game’s earlier runs. There will be points at which you have to activate the Eclipse to move forward, and it took me a few runs to realize you don’t have to activate the Eclipse just because you’ve stumbled upon the apparatus. The segments where you will have to activate it are usually clearly communicated by either a gate that is blocked off with a sun symbol, or other obstacles that cannot be pushed through without altering the world state. You can still hit the switch every time you find one, but weigh whether you’ve got the loadout, time, or patience for a greater challenge if you have the option.

Overlord health regen perk is a game changer

Saros has modifiers that let you buff or nerf the game’s difficulty, and which ones you find most useful will likely be determined by your playstyle, but I do want to shoutout one perk that will help you salvage runs that maybe didn’t go too well. You can flip a switch to recover your health when you reach a boss. In general, heating items are scarce, so anything that gives you a second wind is helpful, but if you’ve had a particularly rough run but still managed to survive until the boss, this perk can truly salvage a run by putting you on decent footing to face a powerful foe with multiple phases.

Go into the portal in the Passage

During your runs, you’ll find portals called Nightmare Strands that are “high risk” areas with a lot of rewards, but also a negative modifier that makes the enemies tougher than your average monster. The game even warns you of this with a pop-up as you approach the entrance in case you want to opt out. My tip here isn’t about Nightmare Strands, though. At a certain point, one of these will appear in the Passage homebase, and I made the mistake of not going in there for a bit because I didn’t feel prepared for a tougher challenge at the time. However, despite this portal looking identical to a Nightmare Strand, it’s actually a non-combat zone with some big story reveals, though Saros doesn’t go out of its way to tell you that. You’ll enter it a few times throughout the game, and you’ll see a golden aura coming from the area each time there’s something new to see, so you can’t really miss it.

Hold keys for later in a run

One of the rare consumable items you’ll come across in Saros are keys that can be used either to unlock gates to a treasure trove of supplies, or a chest with a weapon or piece of equipment relative to your level of Lucenite gathered. Hold onto these keys until later in a run when you stand to actually gain something from the guaranteed upgrade, as using them early on won’t give you as much of a perk.

Prioritize long-term gains over short-term benefits

Saros has a persistent progression system that lets you acquire permanent upgrades that can benefit you in a run so you’re not starting from zero every time you die. One piece of the progression system is an item called Halcyon that you’ll often pick up as part of a drop, often choosing between it and something that might help you on a specific run. My advice is to always pick Halcyon as they’re rare, have a long-term benefit, and later upgrades require a lot of them to lock in. It’s better to play the long game.

If you have a DualSense Edge, adjust your trigger settings

I’ll leave you with a more niche tip for something I came across while using the DualSense Edge modular controller. Saros will change a weapon’s fire depending on how far you push down the triggers, and anyone who uses the DualSense Edge will know this thing lets you adjust your triggers’ thresholds so you don’t have to push them down as far. This can be nice for most games, and I like to set mine to the medium setting, but Saros’ input settings mean you might want as much room to push the trigger down as possible to alternate between different weapon settings on the fly. Maybe you’ve got a lighter touch than I do so you have some more dexterity to press down just the right amount and you won’t need to do this at all, but if you’re using the Edge, maybe test out different settings to see what works best for you.

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