The following is a feature piece talking about the story elements of Saros. Due to the nature of the game’s storytelling, some of the pointed plot points may be either be wrong or interpreted wrongly, and should be treated as an unreliable, though not necessarily uninformed, opinion piece.
Also, there are spoilers for the entire story of Saros, but not The King In Yellow.
Saros is out now for a good bit, and Housemarque has crafted another fantastic PS5 game. If you love the good game feel of pure arcade games, Saros has that. But if you’re more of a modern-day gamer who wants those bombastic, cinematic experiences like AAA games usually do, Saros has a bit of that too. Maybe not as bombast or cinematic, but it’s still a smartly told story.
But what really impressed me is how Saros managed to really reel me in to its cosmic horror story. And it’s another smart storytelling the development team has done that make use of the uniqueness of video games as a medium, in that it’s an interactive experience. Another demonstration of ludonarrative harmony.
And the way it does it is so subtle that I’m not sure most people might get it. I feel like I’m onto something when I realised what’s going on. Or maybe I’m on something. Either way, let me talk through why I think Saros has me hooked.
I think the voices are getting to me.
The Cosmic Horror Of Saros Hits Hard When You Realise It’s Also Tempting You, The Player
In Saros, the first thing you see happen is Tarn getting shot. He approached Arjun, who just appeared for the first time since ever, if whoever is left of Echelon IV is to be believed. You don’t see much of Tarn, but he has this unhinged cadence of speech, odd drivel and there’s something burning in the eyes (metaphorically speaking). Commanding officer Bouchard made the executive call of executing Tarn, to bewilderment of everyone, all five of them.
While he’s now dead, you do get to learn about Tarn yourself from the various audio logs left when you head out of the hub to do your runs. Tarn seems like he got brainwashed and joined a cult. His manner of speech has that religious zeal that sounds unnerving. Maybe he’s just gone crazy, Tarn left the hub, the Passage as it’s called, and went on his own for a while, so who knows what happened to him.
Or maybe we can make an educated guess. Echelon IV, the group Arjun is part of, is supposed to be the search-and-rescue team after the corporate overlords at Soltari lost contact with the previous three Echelon groups amounting to thousands of people that supposed to colonise Carcosa. One would make make a good guess that what happened to Tarn, might’ve happened to the rest of the missing colonists.
As you progress, you find more audio logs left by other colonists, as they all seemed to succumbed to… something. There are mentions of folks so enamoured at the sun that they stared straight at it until they go blind. Some went on to do ghoulish, insane things that physically harm others, and themselves in grotesque ways that I’m glad that the game doesn’t depict visually. There are records of people trying to convince each other about some odd thing that enamoured them, saying deranged things. They are all obsessed with Yellow, capitilised in the subtitles.
It Was All Yellow
And then you start seeing one of the remaining members of Echelon IV, the pilot only known as Stack, starting to lose it.
They too started talking in odd poetry, obsessed with things like the shore. They keep seeing something appeared in their dreams, and instead of doing menial odd jobs Bouchard assigns them to keep busy, they went on to draw something using the paint of Soltari’s corporate colours (even in a SAR mission there’s a corporate mandate to fly the corporate colours, I guess). Eventually, Bouchard snapped and killed Stack, and you see Bouchard also succumbed to whatever is currently happening to just about everyone.
Arjun shot her, just like how she shot Tarn.
Arjun, being the protagonist, sees this event as a straight man. Everything appears insane, but he himself still appears to be mentally intact. He’s the one that warned everyone that the planet is somehow messing with people’s minds. Every event that unveiled up to the end of Act 1 shows how Arjun hasn’t been affected by.. whatever this Yellow thing is.
I don’t think Saros ever explained what is this Yellow entity, or concept, is directly. It’s not a physical thing, certainly not a disease or a virus, the latest tech that can scan an entire body can’t find anything wrong when Stack started becoming a Yellow fan. But what you’ll see unfold is that over time, people will slowly become fans of Coldplay’s first big platinum-hitting single. Even the AI-powered robot. Even Arjun’s talking suit. They were all Yellow.
So too, is Arjun.
Not The Straight Man You Thought He Seemed To Be
Eventually, you do see Arjun’s own insecurities, his delusions, and eventually, his real motivation on taking this mission on Carcosa, to find his wife, is revealed and he then gets tempted by the voices. He too, become Yellow, in his own way.
The twist at the end of Act 1 reveals that Arjun is just delusional as everyone who succumbed to the whispers of Yellow. He hallucinated a whole person on the trip, Sebastian, who was never there. This mysterious person is not in the records in the Databank, the game’s codex entry. No one interacted with him or acknowledged his existence outside of Arjun. He was never there. A product of Arjun’s haunted past, and seemingly someone he cared deeply at one time, even if he doesn’t seem to admit it. Arjun may appear stoic and seemed to be impervious by whatever is affecting everyone here, but no, he just appeared to the player that way. By the end of Act 1, the mask slips off.
From then on, Arjun voices the quiet part of his resolve out loud. He’s not really here to find the lost colonists in Carcosa. He’s just here to find one colonist in Carcosa. His lover (maybe wife?), Nitiya. It’s to the point that the objectives starts saying “Save Nitiya” like she’s some damsel in distress needed rescuing.
Saros ends in the logical conclusion to Arjun’s hidden desires. The main ending is basically Arjun succumbing to this fate, though with his strength, he managed to reach the Yellow Shore and carry the mantle of King by taking him on, and taking the previous King’s place. The Yellow gave him what he wants, what he needs. Arjun wanted to find his wife. Arjun needed to have that power, that control, over her. As the multi-limbed, deformed homunculus that is the King, Nitiya appears besides him. Until the next cycle begins anew.
Yes, Arjun is a piece of shit, an abuser and even an adulterer who seemed to openly have an affair, because he can. He’s in control of this relationship. It would seem that Nitiya was purposefully running away from Arjun. The audio logs and lore drops show how captable she is and how much agency she had with her own actions, not the person Arjun projecting that needs rescuing and saved. Nitiya laments that even leaving for Carcosa, she still somehow ended in a situation where she has to play second fiddle to a controlling, egoistic man—apparently there’s a power struggle among the Echelon I members, that somehow led to war that lasted for ages. Arjun even has a mask-off moment where his strong motivation to save Nitiya isn’t out of love, but him feeling she’s nothing without him at her side. What an absolute work of a person.
What You Want, What You Need…. (Is Power)
But that’s not really what makes the story of Saros good. That whole load of spoilers is just the setup. The real big brain move is how, through the game’s mechanics, you can feel like that the Yellow’s influence hit you, the player as well.
The gameplay loop of Saros reinforces that you become stronger over time. You become stronger throughout the run as you can effectively level up and gain stats points. You also become stronger between each run by permanently upgrading stats and unlocking new passives through the Armour Matrix. Saros is a game of snowballing power, a positive feedback loop that keeps making you stronger and stronger and stronger.
At first, you just want be powerful enough so you can make progress, beat the boss, and see through the story. But there will be a point where you might thought about just playing Saros for fun. You want an excuse to keep playing. You want to do another run. The game’s fun, the power trip of getting stronger over time is addicting. You want more of that. That’s what you want.
See, I argue that, if you reach that point, the cosmic horror that enamoured the people that came to Carcosa has gotten to you, too. All those thoughts? That’s basically the Yellow whispering its gospel straight into your ears. There will be a point where your skills and permanent upgrade unlocks outmatch the game’s difficulty, and there’s the feeling of wanting to crank that difficulty up. You can take it on. You can do this. Imagine how cool it is to be able to do it. Imagine how much fun it is to be able to get through what the game says supposed to be a difficult level setting.
You want that power trip? Saros has what you want, what you need.
So long as you keep playing Saros after the credits roll, that means you to have become one of those mad cultists that lost their minds in Carcosa. Maybe not as crazy, hopefully you don’t inflict self harm, but thematically speaking, you’re now under the Yellow’s influence. You continue to be serenaded into come to the Yellow Shore. You can justify that next Saros run as “work” if you do content creation, or whatever rational reasoning you can come up with. But be real, you’re drawn to the Yellow Shore just like the rest of the poor souls. They’ve gotten you. You stared at the sun, and it’s blazing.
That’s how the cosmic horror of Saros reaches to you. As long as you keep doing one more run, that’s the Yellow’s doing.
Of course, there is a choice. You can just stop playing (if you can, Saros can be crazy addicting!). Or if you feel bad like Arjun should be of his past, you can keep playing over and over again, choosing the Blue Precipice, grovel at Nitiya who’ll never forgive him, as you have Arjun atone in this bullet purgatory. Or rather, a bullet Limbo, as opposed to the developers’ description of Saros being a bullet ballet.
The King In The Yellow Shore
General discussions of cosmic horror, or eldritch horror, usually evokes the name of Lovecraft, whose works on the Cthulhu mythos are ingrained in modern pop culture today. Saros has a different cosmic horror influence. It takes quite some influence from Robert W. Chambers’ The King In Yellow.
A lot of the imagery and worldbuilding are directly lifted from the collection of short stories. The planet of Carcosa shares the same name of the fictional setting Carcosa, which is in the excerpts of The King In Yellow, the in-world book, outlawed in some countries due to how its readers can get an adverse effect on their mental wellbeing. The final boss of Saros, King, is basically The King In Yellow made manifest. And the collection of short stories begin with horrific tale somehow turns up into a love story by the end, which Saros too share similarities.
If you haven’t read The King In Yellow yet, give at least the first story, the influential The Repairer Of Reputations, some of your time. The entire book is in public domain now, so you can full texts available easily. Saros simply uses the idea of unfathomable horrors and the state of mind of humans from The King In Yellow, but the original work it inspired from still holds value if you seek more of this unnerving slow burn style of horror.
Power Corrupts Absolutely
The idea that Housemarque’s masterfully designed gameplay loop that hooks you into playing a roguelike over and over can be interpreted as this unfathomable allure of the unknown which had affected many people, and also you, the player character and you, the player, is a masterstroke.
That’s why I think Saros hit that ludonarrative harmony. There’s an in-game explanation that reinforces the replayability of the game. Housemarque expliciticly make their games to be replayable, and the fact that they found a cool, thematic way to tie the story themes into the gameplay loop.
Props to the writing team for devoting their time in writing some unhinged things that I dare not see even in an M-rated game. There are not that much horror expressed directly for shock value. Yet, the fact that the horror elements subtly ties to the core concept of the gameplay loop, its game design goal, makes Saros one haunting title, especially knowing that some of its horrors can reach to the player directly.
Saros is out now on PS5. Check out our review of the game here.