There was a thing about ten years ago in games crit circles (god, maybe it was more than that, time is an onmarching army etc.) where absolutely everyone seemed to be obsessed with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance. This is the idea that the story in a game, and what you’re doing in that game, are misaligned or even in opposition.

Saros is a game about a stubborn, stupid man who keeps doing the same thing over and over again and refusing to learn from it. In that regard, a roguelite is perfect for it. No notes, no dissonance here, thank you.

However! The game does have a few places where the story, or more precisely the format in which it is delivered, gets in the way of what you’re doing. Saros delivers its story through a combination of cutscenes - which are really well animated and acted, though the dialogue itself is quite wooden - and text and audio logs, which I thought were very well written.

It’s the former that cause problems. Saros really wants to tell you its story in a set timeframe, and to do that it needs to pull you back to The Passage, its home base, in order to show you cutscenes.

This can be really annoying. Getting a good run and a good build in Saros feels fantastic; regular enemies and sometimes even bosses simply melt before you and you’re excited to push on and see what’s around the next corner, bringing all your hard-earned toys with you. Nope, says the game. You gotta go back to watch TV for a bit. Then you’ve got to start again.

Of course, this is a modern roguelite, so there are conveniences like being able to teleport straight to whichever area you want without needing to do a full run, which is something made quite difficult by the areas’ branching, non-linear structure, but it totally saps that feeling of momentum, of rolling downhill, of getting the payoff for your meticulous build crafting or sheer luck.

I don’t recall other roguelite games having this problem. I believe it’s possible to escape in Hades on your first run, though I’d never be able to do it, and if memory serves even Housemarque’s previous game, the excellent Returnal, doesn’t force you back to the start. Part of the fun in this genre is starting again once you’ve finished it, to see how much your mastery of the mechanics helps in the absence of all your permanent upgrades.

Saros and its plot are not at odds, but the way the plot is given to you breaks the game’s progression mechanics in frustrating ways. Maybe that’s ludonarrative dissonance after all. Maybe it’s just poor narrative design.