With Saros, Housemarque makes a case for doing next-gen games differently

It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this — books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That’s how you win. Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit can become absurd, as illustrated by Rockstar Games’ compulsion to animate horse testicles responding to ambient temperature in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 . It also has very little to do with anything a player, well, does. This is where Housemarque diverges from its peers. The Finnish developer is an oddball in the PlayStation Studios roster. Acquired by Sony in 2021, the shop was known for arcade games like Super Stardust HD and Resogun , twin-stick shooters and shoot-’em-ups that leverage contemporary hardware to make their bullet hells appear more like bullet heavens, full of fireworks and lasers vibrantly rendered but in the service of games in the tradition of Asteroids or Defender . They’d be good if they didn’t look as sharp, but it’s cool that they did. Saros , the studio’s latest game , operates on a similar principle. …