Going into Saros, the game had massive shoes to fill for me personally because of how much I absolutely loved Returnal. Returnal wasn’t just a great game to me — it was one of those rare gaming experiences where the gameplay itself felt euphoric. Fast, difficult, overwhelming, stressful in the best way possible. Every run felt intense, every hit mattered, and every boss fight had my palms sweating.
So naturally, after beating Saros — including getting the true secret ending — I kept comparing the two.
And honestly? Saros is incredible.
The gameplay is still absolutely top-tier. Housemarque clearly took everything that worked in Returnal and expanded on it. The movement is fast, the combat is addicting, the bullet hell chaos is still there, and the biome design is beautiful throughout the entire game. Some of the environments and bosses in Saros are genuinely jaw-dropping in scale. The Priestess, the Shepherd, the Architect — these are epic encounters visually, and the game constantly feels cinematic.
But where Returnal focused almost entirely on gameplay, Saros feels much more story-driven. There’s a home base, recurring characters, conversations after death, and a much stronger emotional focus overall. It almost feels like Housemarque took inspiration from games like Hades, where every death pushes both the story and your progression forward.
And to be fair, I actually think the story in Saros is good. The characters are memorable, the emotional beats land, and the game clearly wants you to care more about the world and relationships than Returnal ever did.
My biggest issue is the difficulty.
For me, Saros never quite reached the same highs that Returnal did because it simply wasn’t challenging enough. The boss fights are visually spectacular, but mechanically they rarely pushed me to my limit. In Returnal, even the first boss felt brutal. You’d die repeatedly, slowly learn patterns, improve your movement, and finally overcome the fight after multiple failed runs. That struggle made the victories unforgettable.
In Saros, I rarely felt that same tension.
The game introduces systems like the second chance mechanic, modifiers, and a skill tree that make progression much more forgiving. And while those systems make the game more accessible, they also remove some of the intensity that made Returnal feel so special to me. Knowing I had another life waiting for me immediately lowered the stakes during runs.
The skill tree also became a problem later on because I completely maxed it out before finishing the game. At that point, collecting resources like Luminites started feeling meaningless. Once progression stops mattering, replaying runs loses a lot of its purpose. That was disappointing in a roguelite, especially one that costs full price and is clearly designed around replayability.
Ironically, the hardest and best part of the game for me was the final area, the Yellow Shore. Taking away the second chance mechanic immediately made the game more intense, and the King boss fight finally delivered the level of challenge I had been waiting for the entire game. Every major boss encounter should have felt like that.
That’s the frustrating part about Saros: it’s so close to being a masterpiece.
Everything is there — the incredible visuals, the atmosphere, the music, the movement, the enemy design, the storytelling, the addictive gameplay loop. It’s an amazing game. But I just wanted more resistance from it. More tension. More moments where I genuinely felt overwhelmed and forced to master the mechanics.
Because when a boss looks that gigantic and cinematic, I want it to destroy me a few times before I finally win.
Even with those complaints, though, Saros is still one of the best games I’ve played this year. I sank weeks into it, got the true ending, and enjoyed almost every second of it. The gameplay is fantastic, the world is beautiful, and Housemarque once again proved they understand how to make combat feel incredible.
For me, though, Returnal is still the stronger overall experience because of how relentless and demanding it was.
Saros is a 9/10 game. An amazing follow-up to Returnal — just missing that extra level of challenge that would have pushed it into true masterpiece territory.
