Video Game / Saros

4 Following

Saros is a Roguelike Third-Person Shooter with Bullet Hell elements developed by Housemarque and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It released for PlayStation 5 on April 30, 2026.

The game tells the story of Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli), a powerful Soltari Enforcer who is looking for answers on the shapeshifting planet of Carcosa.

Gameplay builds on the foundations set by Housemarque's previous game Returnal, having Arjun fight against enemies who attack using Bullet Hell-style projectiles; Saros is faster-paced than its predecessor, providing Arjun a shield to prevent damage. Players earn Lucenite during runs, which can be used in the Armor Matrix — which functions as a skill tree — to unlock upgrades.

Previews: Announcement Trailer, Gameplay Reveal Trailer, Story Trailer, Gameplay Overview Trailer, Bringing Our Characters to Life, A Glimpse At Lost Carcosa, Features Trailer, Gameplay Overview Reactions, Preview Trailer, Launch Trailer

Saros contains examples of:

• Abusive Precursors: The Overlords of Carcosa, who were an extremely vicious species that controlled Carcosa before Echelon I arrived. And is Echelon I's crew, having been corrupted by the Lotus-Eater Machine aspects of the Yellow Shore.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Echelon expeditions are all equipped with an AI construct called a "Primary" that synthesizes materials for the colonies and, more importantly, monitors and reports on their activities to Soltari headquarters. The Primary of Echelon IV is an experimental model that can function independently from the Soltari network, which also leaves it vulnerable to the eclipse, and even before then is obsessed with gathering resources at all costs, without regard for the crew.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • It's never made explicitly clear why Arjun killed Sebastian, or what circumstances led to his death. The scenes in the banyan tree suggest Arjun killed him on a job and tried to Make It Look Like an Accident. Sebastian also frequently manifests in a hotel, suggesting infidelity had a part in it, but it's left in the air whether he'd been sleeping with Arjun's wife or Arjun himself.
  • The You Kill It You Bought It nature of the Overlords means that it's not completely clear whether all of them are still the original Echelon I crew. In particular, there's a long list of people who've tried to become the Yellow King via Klingon Promotion, and Arjun's fate in the Fission Mailed normal ending makes it clear that if one of them succeeded, you'd never notice the difference. Likewise, the Priestess boss fight indicates that you're actually fighting several versions of a Legacy Character at once, none of which are the original (Nitya), who has long since escaped.
• Ambiguously Bi: If the implication that Sebastian had an affair with Arjun is accurate, then Arjun himself is this. It's unknown if he killed Sebastian out of horror for his inclinations or out of shame for cheating on Nitya.
• And Then What?: Essentially what happens after the Yellow Shore turns the Echelon I members into the Overlords. They attain godlike powers and build their own highly advanced civilization that they lord over. However, once they achieve that, they essentially have nothing else to do so their inherent greed and paranoia begin to set in, turning on each other and causing their civilization to crumble from the resulting civil war.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: There is no fall damage, unless you take a corrupted artifact that includes fall damage as a penalty. You'll take a small amount of damage if you accidentally fall into a bottomless pit during combat or platforming, but so long as you can land on solid ground, you can fall from a great height without suffering so much as a scratch.
• Apocalyptic Log: The gameplay trailer shows that Arjun can come across Soltari Holologs, which indicate the events that occurred on Carcosa.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Lucenite is a mineral native to Carcosa that is described as an extremely efficient energy source that could, if harnessed properly, provide enough energy to last humanity for centuries. Mining it is the whole reason Soltari Corporation sent the Echelon flights in the first place. In-game, Arjun collects Lucenite from downed enemies and as pickups in the field, and can use them between cycles to permanently improve his armor through the Armor Matrix.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Arjun's shield is capable of blocking most standard projectiles (although Corrupted projectiles will still cause corruption even if blocked), but beam attacks cannot be blocked, breaking his shield and leave him unable to use it again for several seconds while it recharges. Nova projectiles go even farther - not only can they not be shielded against, they also can't be dashed through, forcing Arjun to completely avoid them.
• Auto-Revive: Arjun can unlock "Second Chance" in the Armor Matrix, which allows him to revive instantly when downed the first time to resume the fight.
• Beehive Barrier: One of Arjun's tools is his Soltari Shield, which he can activate to absorb energy projectiles and manifests as a spherical multihexagonal shield around him; the absorbed energy can subsequently be released using Eclipse-driven Power Weapons.
• Benevolent Abomination: The Eclipse / the Yellow Shore is an Emotion Eater that is way too powerful to directly fight...and it doesn't want to anyway, supplying a Lotus-Eater Machine and great power in return for allowing it to feed on desire. It's that humans go mad when given everything they want and it not knowing what desires are healthy that is a problem, and it lets people who don't want to feed it anymore go.
  • A straighter example is the Blue Precipice, which is far less accessible (out of the thousands of colonists who succumbed to Carcosa, we only learn of two who "found" it) but cleanses its visitors of desire and seemingly immunizes them against the Yellow Shore's influence. Unlike the Yellow Shore, which endlessly feeds on the greed it stokes in people until they're gibbering husks, the Blue Precipice also doesn't appear to have any severe mental or physical effects on its adherents.
• Body Horror: The very nature of whatever happened on Carcosa is practically built into the landscape and structures, humanoid figures mutilated, disfigured, fused together across numerous surfaces, and numerous monsters clearly being somewhat recognizable as something vaguely human once. The power of the Overlords enslaved and transformed everyone of Echelon I together in such a horrific fashion as part of the power of the Yellow Shore. And unfortunately for Arjun, we get to see what happens to become the Yellow King in the initial ending.
• Coming-Out Story: Part of Nitya regaining her sanity as an Overlord was falling in love with a woman.
• Company Cross-References: Two pre-order armor sets available with the digital deluxe edition are the Onryō Armour and the Midgard Armour.
• Cosmic Horror Story: As one might expect from a sci-fi story taking place on a planet called "Carcosa." The planet is host to a Genius Loci called the Yellow Shore that endlessly stokes and fulfills people's desires until they're insane, megalomaniacal Eldritch Abominations, and its frequent eclipses create severe warping in the passage of time, so that days, years, or centuries can pass at a fraction of the speed. While the monsters it creates can be killed, the Yellow Shore itself remains unknowable and undefeatable; the best anyone can do is seal it away and resist its temptations.
• Creepy Good: A common trait among people who are corrupted by the Yellow Shore but let go of more destructive desires, becoming more aligned to its nemesis, the Blue Precipice - they're just as much Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant as more megalomanical types, but far less violent and are the first to admit that a world of nothing but wanting just makes them miserable; Stack, who just wanted to make beautiful things, is just painting their area in a mural of the Yellow Shore before their murder, while Kiira and Nitya are trying to war people away from the Shore.
• Dead All Along: Sebastian Torres, seemingly one of Echelon IV's support staff, spends all his time tending to a suspiciously verdant section of the hub area, has no entry in the crew log, and is never mentioned by the other survivors. Unsurprisingly, he turns out to be a hallucination of Arjun's, who killed him at some point before departing Earth.
• Determinator: No matter how many deaths he seemingly endures, no matter what the horrors of Carcosa brings his way, no matter what tribulations his comrades suffer, Arjun will shoulder on against all of it despite his growing irritation and rage to find Nitya. This is not a good thing, given that Nitya wants as far away as possible she can get from him, and the Yellow Shore is all too ready to emblazon a new King if he cannot let go of his desires.
• Dwindling Party: Echelon IV's numbers quickly whittle down over the course of Act I, starting with Tarn being shot in the prologue, followed by Jerome being killed in the Ancient Depths, and then finally Stack being killed by Sheridan after they both succumbed to the Shore's influence, followed by Sheridan being put down by Arjun himself. In the end, only Arjun and Kayla survive the whole horrid affair, except for Sebastian, who was never actually present in the first place outside of Arjun's imagination.
• Eccentric Artist: Stack, after being corrupted by the Shore, starts painting the Corridor in murals of it. However, because they had no real desires other than leaving their Dark and Troubled Past behind and seeing the universe, they are completely nonviolent - instead they are killed by a maddened Sheridan.
• Eldritch Location: The final area of the game is the Yellow Shore - not the Eldritch Abomination responsible for the madness of all the Echelon flights, but an actual physical location that is somehow directly linked to that same being. It can only be reached by people that uncover the "path" to it, and is described in the Databank as impossible to locate in both physical location and time.
• Fatal Flaw: Most of the the Soltari personnel who succumb to the temptation of the Yellow Shore have at least one that makes them susceptible to its influence.
  • Arjun is obsessed with finding Nitya, convinced that only he can save her and that she needs him. In truth, Nitya had already cut all ties and wants nothing to do with him, and is able to survive on Carcosa on here own. Suffice to say, that means he puts everybody else's well being at a distant second, even if he doesn't want to admit it. He nearly becomes the new Yellow King before realizing he has to let go of his longing for Nitya.
  • Nitya desires getting away from Arjun and making a new life for herself where she can determine her own destiny. She eventually becomes the Priestess, but chafes at being the Yellow King's Number Two who she feels has taken the credit for everything she did, causing her to rebel against him.
  • Both Delroy and Sheridan as the captains of their respective Echelons are Control Freaks who do not tolerate dissent among their ranks. Sheridan grows paranoid that her surviving crew will mutiny and murders Stack and is about to kill Kayla before Arjun guns her down. Delroy becomes the Yellow King and rules Carcosa with an iron fist.
  • Alab and Lina are both ambitious and crave power. Alab feels he can hoard Carcosa's secrets and technology for himself and seize control of Soltari, while Lina doesn't want to settle for being a corporate drone and wants to claw her way higher on the social ladder. Both of them abandon the Echelon IV mission early on to pursue their own interests. While Alab's ultimate fate is unknown, Lina's quest for power ultimately gets her killed when she inadvertently angers the Priestess.
• Fate Worse than Death: It quickly becomes clear that anyone who dies on Carcosa got off lightly. The monsters swarming the planet are all former colonists who were enslaved and remade by the planet's Overlords, who were themselves the pioneers of Echleon I having been driven insane by the eclipse. This goes all the way up to the Yellow King himself, who destroyed all of his fellow "gods" and took everything he wanted — only to find that it still wasn't enough, left to seethe in his envy and paranoia on the Yellow Shore for eternity as it tempted other people into trying to take his power for themselves.
• Fission Mailed: The first time you manage to defeat the Yellow King, the game proceeds to show Arjun becoming the next one in his place, before winding back to go discover the various logs and flashbacks that may have been missed as well as additional scenes added in certain areas for further clarification on the way to the true ending.
• Foreshadowing: As soon as your first death, Arjun sees.. something in the loading screen, yellow and distant like a spiral, surrounded by other spirals all about. And every time the player triggers an Eclipse, there's a visage of someone's eye turning golden amidst the flashes of hellfire and change. Both of these come from the normal ending, where Arjun becomes the new Yellow King complete with Transformation Horror, and then the camera pans outwards to show his throne symbolized as atop the center of the spiral - the depths of it being the loading screen since the very start of the game. Without understanding the depths of what he'll do, Arjun is trapped in the cycles of Carcosa and will endlessly become the King every time he "wins" to find Nitya.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Unlike Returnal, whose story justified its looping roguelike structure all the way to the end, the epilogue of Saros is intended to be conclusive, with no reason given why Arjun can continue running back through stages afterward other than picking up the remaining trophies and datalog entries, instead seemingly being just before his final confrontation with the King.
• Genius Loci: Carcosa turns out to host two of them — the Yellow Shore, which is responsible for (or might actually be) the planet's constant eclipses and drives the colonists insane with greed, and the Blue Precipice, which takes away desires instead and only seems to manifest to those who resist the Shore's pull.
• I Reject Your Reality: A big early hint that Arjun is a Yandere is simply not comprehending information that shows that Nitya is not thinking about him, or that finding her may be impossible - like after discovering the Timey-Wimey Ball that means most of the previous Echelons are dead, he angrily states it’s impossible and keeps looking.
• I Will Find You: Arjun is determined to find his wife, Nitya, and "make everything perfect again". Deconstructed - it turns out this is possessive rather than loving, and him coming to understand this is key to freeing both of them.
• Ink-Suit Actor: As shown in the gameplay trailer, Arjun looks like his voice actor Rahul Kohli.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: At a couple points in the Shattered Rise, Arjun has to walk through an open gate that automatically shuts behind him, blocking off the backtracking path. It's actually very easy to cross the threshold, trigger the gate-closing animation, then immediately turn around and try to sprint back through the still-significant open space between the closing gates. But the game places an invisible barrier as soon as the gates start closing, and you can't push through, no matter how much space there seems to be.
• Light Is Not Good: The eclipse and the Yellow Shore that produces it is heavily associated with light and bright yellow...and as shown whenever Arjun triggers it, it sets the world on fire. Being made into an Overlord's servant monster is called Illumination for a reason.
• Lighter and Softer: While the eldritch nightmare is more blatant than Returnal, ultimately Arjun comes to realize he's bound himself to Saros and Carcosa through his own possessiveness of his wife, and frees himself when he accepts being Amicable Exes at best, while Nitya regains her sanity despite being an Overlord and finds some happiness with her Second Love, keeping the Yellow Shore’s influence restricted to Carcosa.
• Lovecraft Lite: The game is about being menaced by a seemingly living planet with incomprehensible motives that ultimately wants to grant wishes in return for nibbling on their desires, but clearly doesn't understand how to deal with conflicting desires, like Nitya's desire to be free of Arjun and Arjun's love for her. Ultimately, Arjun realizing that he's making Nitya miserable and this is what traps him in a Stable Time Loop, as Carcosa makes him the King in Yellow in an attempt to rectify the issue, and lets go.
• Maximum HP Reduction: During the Eclipse, many enemies will fire yellow Corrupted projectiles in addition to normal blue projectiles. Getting hit with these Corrupted projectiles causes a reduction in Arjun's maximum Integrity. Trying to shield against Corrupted projectiles will block the shots, but will still cause the Corruption to seep through. Using Power weapons will cause the Corruption to go away and the maximum Integrity reduction to be reverted to normal.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Downplayed, but Arjun being illuminated by police lights in the True Ending maybe hints that this was a dark dream induced by his guilt over killing Sebastian and shame over Nitya leaving him. However, keep in mind red and blue are already hinted to be opposing the corrupt Yellow Shore, and this was already in the surreal Yellow Shore, indicating it's just as possible he's using the Shore's powers to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and let the cops arrest him in the past and ensuring Nitya never feels the need to flee to Carcosa to get away from him, or even a side effect of him ruminating on becoming The Atoner. The last shot is of his discarded pendant in the Shore, hinting it was real.
• MegaCorp: Soltari Corporation, Arjun's employer, is an Earth-based corporation that is described as having an enormous portfolio and millions of employees. The plot of the game is set in motion by an attempt for expand their reach even further by colonizing other planets. They also have a military presence, as shown by their "Enforcers" like Arjun and the plethora of weaponry and combat equipment that Arjun makes use of throughout the game.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: It's not just humans who are susceptible to Carcosa's madness. Your suit AI and the Primary base command unit become increasingly unhinged over the course of your adventures, and even the in-game database entries start ranting at you during an Eclipse. Your suit eventually gets a hold of itself and reveals itself to be a Sour Supporter piece of Haunted Technology that's offering you harsh-but-helpful Brutal Honesty. The other examples have no such excuse.
• Phlebotinum Overload: Picking up Artifacts when Arjun's stats are already exceptionally high can result in corruption that gives him a permanent debuff for that run:
  • The "Resilience" stat, which determines his max health, becomes "Arrogance," concealing the health bars of all enemies.
  • The "Drive" stat, which determines the value of Lucenite pickups, becomes "Negligence," resulting in loss of all Lucenite on death.
  • The "Power" stat, which determines the energy for special weapons, becomes "Ignorance," hiding the negative effects of any corrupted Artifacts.
• Precursors: Zig-zagged. At first, it seems like all of the human colonists were either killed or horrifically mutilated by some sort of ancient species that preceded any known life on Carcosa. Then you start seeing man-made structures, temples, ruins attributed to... something, followed by explicit technology that seems specialized to the planet. Turns out those "precursors" were Echelon I and the following colony attempts the entire time, having found the Yellow Shore and "ascending" in ways that that made them seem nearly inhuman, attaining impossibly advanced heights and having Time Dilation from our perspective, functionally putting them centuries or more beyond the Soltari standard, thus making them a near-present divergence point rather than predecessors.
• Rule of Symbolism: The banyan tree represents meditation and enlightenment in Hinduist mythology. A massive specimen mysteriously grows in Echelon IV's operations hub and occasionally offers glimpses into Arjun's past, while the eclipse will occasionally show an image of Carcosa's insanity-inducing sun burning a banyan tree to cinders. Kiira, one of Arjun's only allies who is trying to help him let go of desires, also has her soul in a banyan tree Nitya planted as a symbol of their love.
• Shout-Out: The name of the planet Arjun is on, Carcosa, as stated in promotional materials, is named after the Ambrose Bierce short story, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (to make the reference even more evident, the character Linwood Bierce shares his surname with the author). Though Carcosa as a concept is, perhaps, better known for its association with Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow short story collection, something which is reflected by the game's yellow Color Motif and very overtly with the Yellow Shore and the final boss faced there (though the game only refers to the boss as "King", the fact that he is faced in the Yellow Shore definitely isn't a coincidence).
• Skill Scores and Perks: The Armor Matrix functions as a relatively linear skill tree, with nodes that improve Arjun's stats and increase how many artifacts can he equip during a run. The Armor Matrix isn't fully accessible from the outset, however, as access to further nodes is unlocked by defeating bosses.
• Tin-Can Robot: The Echelon Primaries (AI command and control units for Soltari Corporation outposts) are a relatively sleek, high-tech take on this concept. They're large, semi-mobile installations that resemble coffins with LED screens on the front.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: As shown in the gameplay reveal, reaching the alien device causes an eclipse on Carcosa, corrupting the world and changing the gameplay, audio, and visuals on the planet: everything becomes more orange, and enemies fire corrupted projectiles that can reduce Arjun's armor. It's later revealed to not be a moon, but something native to Carcosa that feeds on desires, likely another form of the Yellow Shore.
• Tranquil Fury: In a flashback sequence, Nitya light-heartedly compares Arjun's friends to his father. A few moments later, Arjun tells her — calmly, but with clear anger in his eyes and voice — to never compare him to his father again.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The nature of Carcosa means that time is hardly a stable thing to calculate, with explicit Time Dilation occurring between areas for reasons no one is quite able to make sure of. Arjun repeatedly leaves the Echelon IV survivors only for them to act like he's been gone a lot longer than he was from his perspective, which drives part of their initial tensions with him due to assumptions that he'd died or abandoned them entirely at first. This horrifies Nitya when she realizes Arjun has arrived, pointing out that to her she's been stuck in the endless cycle of being an Overlord over the power of the Yellow Shore for centuries - but to Arjun, his trauma over their failed marriage and thus his obsessive reasons to come for her are "like yesterday". In the path to the true ending, Arjun even disappears for decades, leaving Kayla with graying hair as what she thought was otherwise the Sole Survivor.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: An extremely dark version — Arjun killing the King in Yellow, originally Arnold Delroy, to claim his power and get a version of Nitya that matches his romantic ideas of their relationship just causes him to mutate into a functionally identical King. Only sparing the King and then throwing away the pendant that symbolizes his remaining hope that he's able to force their marriage to continue, allows Arjun to retain his humanity.
• Was Once a Man: Most of the Overlords are the original members of the Echelon I crew after the Shore transformed them.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The pre-order trailer shows tempers fraying between Arjun's team on Carcosa, with him speculating that this is being caused by being on the planet.
  Kayla: You've left us here. We've lost people! There's- there's no way to get home and you-
  Arjun: LIES! [sweeps the device off the table] This is what it does. It gets in our heads and it twists and it turns.
• What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Whoever decided to call the planet Carcosa must have known what they were doing.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: While it's safe to assume that nearly all of the Echelon colonists are dead, the exact nature of their fates is mostly left unknown. Special mention goes to the Irvines, whose sideplot cuts off just before Red attempts to reunite with an eclipse-crazed Carly, Eli, who's last seen still alive and reveling in the planet's chaos, and Alab, whose final audiolog has him ready to venture to the Yellow Shore alone.