Returnal vs. Saros

Somewhere around the eighth hour of Saros, I caught myself thinking about Selene's house. Not the gunplay I was in the middle of, not the corridor I was clearing, not the boss I was preparing to face, but the house: the small, unbearable house in Returnal that intruded on the alien planet without warning, in first person, all carpeted hush and refrigerator hum, and which by some uncanny act of design felt more dangerous than anything Atropos could throw at me. That, I realized, was the problem. I was eight hours into the new game and my mind had gone looking for the old one. Saros is a competent, occasionally striking game. Returnal is a masterpiece. To play them in sequence is to understand, with uncomfortable clarity, how thin the membrane is between the two.

Returnal's biomes are labyrinths in the original sense of the word: winding, vertical, layered, and filled to the brim with hidden passages that double back on themselves like recursions of a bad dream. Their compression is the point. Every chamber bukcles into the next, every corridor implies a room you haven't checked out yet. Exploring Atropos is the same as feeling the architecture conspiring flawlessly with the narrative, the way the leve itself becomes a metaphor for Selene's psyche, one dominated by claustrophobia, recursion, and a refusal to release oneself.

Saros, by contrast, sprawls. Man, it just sprawls. Its environments are wider and flatter and arrive sooner at their own limits. I'll clarify here that the first hour is legitimately impressive. Whatever the design intent, though, the practical effect is sameness, a quality that feels damning in a roguelite/like, where the engine of replay is the promise that the next run will reeveal what the last one obscured. Returnal kept that promise for fifty hours and more, but Saros broke it way sooner for me.

I've noticed in a lot of offerings in art in the last ten years that there's a color discipline that mistakes restraint for sophistication. I had my suspicions when the game was revealed, and they were confirmed when I played it: Saros has fallen into that mistake. Its palette of grey upon grey, accented by the currently ubiquitous orange of the prestige television color grade, comes off as moody and considered at first. By the fourth hour, it just feels insufferably monotonous to me. My eye ached for something, anything, resembling the lush, saturated, and sometimes obscene beauty of Returnal's biomes. Give me something that isn't so far removed from the bioluminescent blues of the Overgrown Ruins, the puncturing reds of the Crimson Wastes, or the wet dripping fungal cathedral that is the Abyssal Scar. Returnal wasn't afraid of color, it wasn't afraid of texture, and it sure as hell wasn't afraid of strangeness. Saros almost feels embarrassed of itself in this respect, and is a particularly strong demonstration of sequels that pull back reflexively and play it safe rather than doubling down on what made the original so singular.

Story is one of the deepest differences I can point to when comparing and contrasting these two. It also, I feel, explains all the other differences. You see, I think of Returnal as a brilliantly engineered video game that decided after the fact to put on the clothing of an A24 sci-fi horror film, and wore it to perfection. The aesthetic here was in service of the game. The fragmentary cutscenes, the suburban house intrusions, the ghostly astronuat, and the looping signal were all draped beautifully over a structure that was as its a core a roguelite third person shooter of exceptional rigor. The clothes simply flattered the body underneath.

Not so with Saros, though. The relationship is inverted. It feels like an A24 film that someone has inserted into a video game. The aesthetic is no longer in service of the game; it's the game that is now in service of the aesthetic. Mechanics thus yield to mood, friction is sanded away on the chance that it might disturb the tone, and the result is a work that takes itself with a seriousness that I can't help but feel it hasn't earned. It's a game so committed to its own atmosphere that it forgets the atmosphere is supposed to be the second thing you notice rather than the first.

Sonically and musically, they're much closer in register. Saros's score is higly competent and has some really haunting vibes. The level music breathes really well and it knows when to recede and when to press. But still, after about 60 hours, I can't summon any particular melody from it. Nothing has, ya know, lodged. Nothing follows me into the kitchen or to the laundry room or wherever. But Returnal's boss themes are another category entirely. These aren't no stinkin' background tracks. They're downright antagonists. Think of the choral architecture of Ixion, the shrieking strings of Nemesis, and then, of course, the ascent of the Echoing Ruins: that haunted, climbing rendition of "Don't Fear the Reaper" that swells in volume and complication with every floor, until, by the time you face Hyperion, the song isn't simply playing in the background but is somehow the very fight itself. Saros doesn't have anything to compete with this.

Let's talk about bosses next. I defeated every boss in Saros on the first attempt, and I played without modifiers. I should clarify this isn't a flex so much as it is a complaint. A roguelite boss that falls on the first try hasn't done its job. Its job is to fuck my shit up and teach me its very own mechanics, and to teach by failure, to make me return to it not as a conqueror, but as a student, and to keep me coming back until the patterns stop being patterns and start being instinct. Saros's bosses are commendable iterations of ideas the first game introduced, but they feel as though they've been declawed on the way over.

Returnal's bosses possess a musicality, a coherent rhythm of attack and pause and tell, demanding attention and dexterity, demanding that you read the encounter as you would read a difficult sentence: parse that shit, dude. Parse it again and again until you got it. Saros is bullet hell, sure, and it's plenty challenging in the abstract. But challenge, as Returnal showed, isn't the same as resistance. The bosses in Saros don't resist you so much as tolerate, and you finish each one with the sense that you haven't really been tested so much as timed.

But what's a shooter without guns? Returnal's arsenal was a love letter. Each weapon is a personality. Each weapon, the more you use it, opens upward into successive traits, tiers of capability that the game gave you only in exchange for your sustained attention. The grind isn't character progression like in Saros: it's intimacy. You aren't leveling up Selene; you're leveling up the Hollowseeker or the Pylon Driver, or whatever gun you preferred. Saros's weapons are fewer, less expressive, and perhaps most damningly, they shoot for you. The auto-aim is so generous with the majority of the weapons that the combat feels more like procedure after a while than a performance. Saros then becomes a game you can passively play while listening to podcasts, rather than the edge-of-seat palms sweaty mom's spaghetti endeavor Returnal gives you. Don't get me wrong: Returnal has some auto-aim mechanics too, but they're far less... prominent and ubiquitous than in Saros. You point in the general direction of the enemy and the game does the rest for the most part. There are variants of guns to find, but there's no upward path through any single one of them: the weapon you pick up is always the weapon it's going to be.

But the thing that makes Returnal so overwhelmingly superior to me is the risk and reward systems. These are the most addictive quality of the game, the thing that made every run feel electric and irreplaceable: the constant vibrating negotation between greed and prudence. The malignant items that might very well gift you a relic or curse you with a malfunction, or the malfunctions themselves, which force you to choose between a known cost and an uncertain cure, or the consumables you had to actually consume, knowing you wouldn't get them back... the singularity of every run: THIS configuration of weapons and parasites and luck which would never exist again, which death would erase utterly.

Saros has either removed or diluted nearly all of this. This time around, death isn't erasure; death is a deposit. You keep the gun you picked up, and the materials you accumulate persist, and you spend them between runs to fortify your character, so that the next attempt begins not at zero, but at zero plus everything you have saved up. I understand why this design choice exists. I understand the audience it courts. For me, however, the cost is too high, the cost being the pulse of the game itself. Returnal required a marriage of skill and luck. It was an uneasy marriage, sure, but that uneasiness was the point. Saros requires, as far as I can tell, neither; it requires only patience.

It's not that Saros is too easy. It's plenty hard. But its difficulty feels divorced from what made Returnal's difficulty so alluring to rise up and face. Returnal was difficult the way, say, a storm is difficult: it's indifferent, it's unrepeatable, and it requires you to meet it on its own terms in the moment it has arrived. Saros is difficult in the way a long hallway is difficult. You'll get to the end of it. The only question is when.

I don't begrudge Saros for its choices. They're easily defendable and some of them are acclaimed by many players, and there are players for whom the persistent progression and the forgiving aim and the muted palette aren't concessions so much as generosities, and I'm not trying to argue any of those players out of their pleasure. But Returnal was a singular kind of miracle, the kind of thing that happens when a studio at the height of its powers makes a game that doesn't flinch one fucking bit, and the chief disappointment of Saros is that, asked to follow such a thing, it has flinched. The clothes still fit but the body underneath has gone soft.