I have been excited about Saros, developer Housemarque’s upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive, since its reveal, particularly because the studio’s prior game, Returnal, is still my favorite first-party game on the console. That said, its trailers have emphasized the color orange a lot. And look, I’m not a hater of the color – in fact, it used to my favorite color (now it’s purple), so much so that when I was a young boy, I wore this one orange shirt so often that I got bullied at school for it (kids suck, man, it was a cool Billabong shirt). But, despite my dormant love for orange, it was getting stale with each new look at Saros.
I’m happy to bring you the good news that the color orange, while important to Saros thematically, is not as present in the game as its marketing thus far would have you believe.
I recently played Saros for about three hours, running through its first two biomes and taking down the big boss of each, and while I did see a decent amount of orange, the majority of my time previewing the game was painted in all manners of colors.
Thematically, orange represents the alien sun that protagonist Arjun keeps seeing (and he wears a necklace with an amulet of that very sun, too). In both starting biomes, you reach a point where, to progress, you must interact with strange alien machinery. When you do so, an eclipse happens, painting the environment in a burnt orange that signals a mechanical change at that point: an increase in difficulty. When an eclipse happens, every enemy gets tougher, but the Lucenite (experience used to upgrade Arjun) they drop gets more abundant, too. Of course, I’ve only played three hours of Saros, so there’s likely more orange (and meaning for it) to be found.
“I’m glad you felt there was variation in there,” Saros art director Simone Silvestri tells me when I say I’m shocked that the game isn’t as orange as I thought it’d be. “But yeah, for us, the eclipse is the center of everything. It’s the narrative theme that transforms the gameplay, transforms the world. So, of course, the cool challenge of this was that we wanted to preserve the philosophy of atmosphere in Returnal, but we wanted to evolve it into what this game [Saros] needs. And Saros needs escalation; it’s constant escalation.
“So we started with something that is a little bit more grounded, that has its own identity, its own color palette. And then, once you put on the eclipse [which players will manually do in-game], that’s when we want to really shock you with this force that is corrupting the entire world, and that’s why we injected these much warmer tones.”
When the game wasn’t orange, I was seeing all kinds of colors. The first biome is a mix of a royally dark maroon, almost like blood, and a stark gray-white. It was a beautiful contrast and highlighted Housemarque’s superb environmental design. The second biome features a much darker color palette, thanks to its heavy use of machinery to paint the environment. There are pipes and hoses and metal everywhere – it reminds me of being under the rotting pizza that is Midgar in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. When the eclipse occurs at each level, their color palettes are bathed in harsh orange sunlight, but thematically and mechanically, this new sun-imbued color is used to drive home the challenge Arjun now faces after the sun endures its brief blackout.
Silvestri says it’s important that each biome in Saros has its own identity and escalates with each eclipse. “Each biome is going to surprise you in different ways, both in gameplay and with art,” he says. “For me, because the game can be a little challenging, I want to reward you. Every time you move forward, you should have a new thing to discover, visually as well, a new experience to discover. So, the way that we scripted the game was a lot of, ‘Let’s preserve the warmest, shocking tone for the eclipse because it needs to feel dangerous and threatening. But let’s start from something more subdued that can give you that sense of atmosphere and worldbuilding and immersion, and then when the escalation comes [the orange and the eclipse], we flip the script every single time.'”
Orange or not, my three hours of hands-on time with Saros have made it my most anticipated game of the year, easily.
Saros launches exclusively on PlayStation 5 on April 30.
In the meantime, read Game Informer’s Returnal review, and then read my Saros preview. After that, read about how Housemarque says arcade isn’t dead anymore.
What are you most excited about in Saros? Let us know in the comments below!
