Kirk Hamilton
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I think we're looking forward to talking about it.
So I wrote a little intro for it, which I will now read to you all.
Sauros is a third-person roguelike shooter with a narrative rooted in sci-fi cosmic horror.
It places an emphasis on fast-paced firefights in enclosed areas, with players shooting, jumping, and air-dashing their way through spiraling vortexes of color-coded enemy attacks.
You can think of it as a third-person iteration of what's come to be known as bullet hell gameplay.
Think Gradius, Ikaruga, or more modern derivations like Enter the Gungeon, or even Hades, or Vampire Survivors.
Undertale definitely has some bullet hell elements.
The map is constantly covered in streams of slow-moving projectiles, sometimes fast-moving projectiles, which players must navigate while executing their own offensive maneuvers.
Finnish developer Housemarque has a long history with bullet hell game design, particularly in their celebrated Super Stardust games, though Saros is most clearly a follow-up to their 2021 game Returnal, and it's very similar in most respects.
I suppose I should say Saros, because we've had some discussions of how to pronounce the name of this game.
It's actually the character with all the arms on the cover of the game.
In Saros, you play as Arjun Devraj, a soldier working for Seltari, a corporation who have funded the colonization of a planet called Carcosa in pursuit of the mineral leuconite, a powerful energy source.
Sultari has sent and lost contact with several colonies, codenamed Echelon, before Arjun's Echelon IV group arrives, tasked with finding what happened to the colonists of Echelons I through III and reestablishing the extraction of Lucenite.
Devraj also has a more personal stake in his mission.
His wife, Nitya, was among the earlier colonists who have gone missing.
Of course, Carcosa is not a normal planet.