Best Games: Saros

Best Games of the 2020’s is back after a bit of a gaming drought this year. While a good, but unfortunately flawed sequel leaves the list.

Saros(2026) goes on at 41

Every fourth game I play these days is a rogue like. What sets the good ones apart is a compelling game loop or a narrative doled out in small plates that leave you wanting more. If you are Hades you nail both and make one of the best games in the last 20 years. If you are Saros, you offer up novel combat and I skip your cut scenes.

The addictive loop Saros offers is a bullet hell in 3D^. You are dodging, parrying, and blocking while a billion beams, orbs, and explosions come at you. All while throwing damage back out. When you full drift with Saros there isn’t a feeling like it. Its like Neo seeing the matrix. Until you block instead of parry the red orbs, break your combo, and mutter a little “dammit” into your living room.

^New to me, but not to those that played Returnal the last game from the same developer.

Toss challenging boss fights into that mix and you get an interesting test to bookend every stage. Death has a low barrier and is a chance to progress your stats and abilities, before going back at it again.

Finally the story. It is very hard sci-fi, plus time travel, plus psycho thriller. It is all a little too complicated and I didn’t with any of the character or their motivations. The main character wants to save a person he loves and needs to fight aliens to do it? Great, “X to skip” and put me in coach!

God of War Ragnarök (2022) was a very good sequel, but the game it followed from 2018 was maybe a perfect modernization of the series. 4 years later it tried to eclipse the story and gameplay. It got close, but all it seemed to have in the bag was a lot of “more”, not enough “new”.