SAROS

For now, I’ll say Housemarque’s “house style” of tough-as-nails roguelike dipped in symbolism has managed to capture lightning in a bottle twice, and in a PlayStation ecosystem where Sony threatens to homogenize all its output, this studio maintaining what makes it distinct in the company’s catalog is just as challenging a feat as anything you’ll face in the game itself. Saros is a prickly, demanding game whose hours of physical and mental carnage will make it difficult to parse for some, but I keep diving back in and finding new philosophical and mechanical challenges to overcome each time.

Being able to turn yourself into an overpowered king by flipping a few switches has its advantages. It gave me more breathing room to marvel at Carcosa’s ornate alien architecture. It let me try different artifacts and test out how a negative perk would mess with my play style. And it allowed me to get more aggressive in battle, which meant generating more glorious particle explosions that put my PS5 Pro to work. Even with my frustrations, Saros still had me glued to my controller as a work of pure sci-fi spectacle with an eerie atmosphere that bleeds out of your TV.