Housemarque’s bullet hell roguelite successor Saros is set to launch on 30th April, and with such little time before release, they’ve shared a look at the overarching progression and structure of the game.
The core of the game will be familiar to anyone that played Returnal, and there’s common ground to a lot of other roguelites in structure. You’ll play, you’ll die, you’ll upgrade and you’ll try again.
Between runs, Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli) is returned to the Passage, a Carcosan temple that is a hub to the game. Here you can talk to other crewmembers of the ship, as well as make use of the upgrade portal. Here you can increase armour, generate a material more quickly, upgrade power capacity for the shield and even the Second Chance system.
There’s also the Carcosan Modifiers, letting you tweak parts of the games difficulty, but for every boon, you’ll have to forego something in return to keep th world in balance. Protection Modifiers can make weapon reloads faster, boost the shield and more, but they’re balanced out by Trial Modifiers making enemies more aggressive, adding weapon power degradation and more. You choose the balance.
A great feature for day one is the inclusion of fast travel, so that you can immediately start a run at the last biome you reached. On death your main and power weapon are kept, so you can return right to the fight and try again, effectively. It’s great to see this will be there on day one, and not arrive in a patch months later.
Finally there’ the eclipse. You can trigger this by reaching a gnarly hand thing, causing the sun to be blocked out, but this sets the world ablaze, introducing corrupted enemies, changing the environments and more. The sound of the world is also twisted, with Sam Slater’s soundtrack gaining more distortion and layering.
Source: PS Blog
