Kirk Hamilton

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.

You meet a character named Saros.

It's actually the character with all the arms on the cover of the game.

No, I'm kidding.

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.

It's more of a Lovecraftian hell world where nothing is as it seems.

Dangerous enemies lurk around every corner, powerful eclipses rewrite the rules of reality, and time does not function as it should.

Arjun and his companions find themselves trapped in a surreal spiral of looping time and madness as their grip on reality slips and he continues to fight his way forward.

And that's Sorrows, pretty much.

You start shooting stuff and you go in loops because it's a roguelike and it's pretty damn fun.

So we've all played kind of similar amounts, not a whole ton, but I think enough to know what this game is kind of about.

So let's talk about it.

Maddie, how about you kick us off?