Saros difficulty level is a direct respond to Returnal, says Housemarque

You won't be left for dead in the Crimson Wastes this time around

Ask a thousand people to describe Returnal in one word, and you’re bound to hear the same answer repeated many times: “hard.” Housemarque’s 2021 sci-fi shooter is a notoriously challenging roguelike thanks to its fast and brutal bullet hell action. Seeing it through to the end means getting past an early-game difficulty spike that even gave seasoned Souls players a hard time.

Saros, Housemarque’s different-but-similar follow-up, is much more manageable by comparison. It still starts on a very challenging note, but it gives players more ways to mitigate that struggle thanks to extensive metaprogression and a mod system that basically lets you build your own easy mode. It’s Saros’ most significant departure from Returnal, and something that was very deliberately designed.

In a video interview with Polygon, creative director Gregory Louden and associate design director Matti Häkli explained why Housemarque made Saros more approachable than Returnal. The decision came down to a simple fact: a lot of players just couldn’t beat Returnal.

“We knew we created something special and we knew that everyone loved Returnal, but people did tell us, ‘I wanted to love Returnal, but I just couldn't get forward,’” Louden told Polygon. “So we wanted to allow players to confront the challenge in their own way. That was the idea of rewarding the progress. It was the idea of adding the modifiers. But something I'm really proud of Matti and our amazing design team is these modifiers don’t just make the game more approachable. It makes it way more brutal, which I think is super cool.”

In Returnal, players don’t get much help when exploring Atropos, a hostile planet filled with energy-spewing aliens. The game has a roguelike structure that requires players to go out on runs, grab as many mods as possible, die, and try again. Getting all the way to the end requires a lot of trial and error, as well as completing a fairly long run.

What’s even harder is that the challenge spikes early in the Crimson Wastes, one of the game’s six biomes. The desert area is a major skill check that has the tendency to end runs before players can even begin to understand what’s happening with its cryptic hero, Selene. According to Steam data, 37.9% of players earned the trophy for completing the game's first act, while only 6.4% of players completed the third act. Housemarque saw that as a problem — not just for Returnal, but for converting players to fans of the studio.

“What we did find is once people got through the second biome, they loved the game,” Louden said. “They say it's one of the best PlayStation 5 games for them. How can we share this experience, and how can we get even more people to love what we're building? And then the dream for us is once they love Saros, they go back through 30 years of Housemarque history and jump into Returnal and Nex Machina and Matterfall and Resogun and Alienation and Dead Nation. We have a rich history, so it's just about wanting to get even more people to understand the Housemarque experience.”

Saros does a lot to address that. Even aside from the massive skill tree, which lets players pick up dozens of permanent boosts after a good attempt, completing a run is more manageable too. You don’t have to start from the beginning when you die; you can always load into the most recent biome you’ve reached. Your average biome takes around 30 minutes to complete, after which you can head back to the game’s hub area and cash in all your Lucenite for upgrades. It almost plays more like a linear action game than a roguelike.

The biggest difficulty mitigator, though, is the Carcosan Modifiers system. Unlocked after clearing the first couple of areas, Carcosan Modifiers allow players to give themselves boosts when going out on a run, though they need to be balanced out by activating negative modifiers. If you want more defense, you could choose to reduce your shield’s power or make it so you bank less currency after a run. You can make the game far more manageable that way, but you can make it much tougher too. Housemarque isn’t exactly thinking about that system in terms of “easy” or “hard.”

“I wanted to enable more people to enjoy these games,” Häkli said. “I knew that Returnal was brutal, so that was the impetus to start building something that is more approachable, but not necessarily making it easier. Just figuring out ways of giving players more room and time to learn the ropes, and understand the mechanics, because everything is really circling around the flow state. Internalizing the inputs, understanding what's going on, having the confidence that I can do this.”

Those who loved Returnal for its unrelenting challenge may find some of Saros’ changes disappointing, but keep in mind that many of these new systems are optional. You can ignore the mod system altogether, or use it to enable negative modifiers. You can choose to start from the first biome every time you die if you so please. (Although you can’t do a full start-to-finish run that way.) Heck, you can even refuse to unlock nodes on the skill tree if you’re a real masochist. Housemarque’s goal is just to give everyone more tools so it can make sure more players see Saros through to the end.

“When it clicks, it's something unlike any other game,” Häkli said. “And I just want to make sure that more people will experience that rather than leave it for a very small niche that only the hardcore players will understand.”