While there has been plenty of praise for Housemarque’s latest roguelite bullet hell shooter, Saros, many players have noticed that it is considerably easier than the studio’s last outing, Returnal. In an interview with Polygon, creative director Gregory Louden and associate design director Matti Häkli explained the reasoning behind this decision.
Discussing the difficulty of Saros when compared to Returnal, Louden noted that many players just outright weren’t able to finish the latter game. This meant that the studio would have to give players more tools to take on the challenges in Saros in their own way.
“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,’” said Louden. “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.”
He went on to discuss the major difficulty spike that pops up in Returnal when players reach its second biome – the Crimson Wastes. Bringing up the fact that players would praise Returnal after reaching its second biome, Louden made note of the fact that the same players would then likely get blocked by the difficulty spike.
“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.”
For Häkli, the reasoning behind making Saros more approachable than Returnal was simple – he wanted to make sure that more people could enjoy the title. He also reaffirmed that Saros isn’t quite that much easier than Returnal. Rather, it is simply more approachable since players have more room to experiment with weapon types and their own movesets.
“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.”
“When it clicks, it’s something unlike any other game,” Häkli continued. “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.”
Saros is available on PS5. For more details, check out our review.
