Saros: Housemarque's Eclipse Shooter Is PlayStation's Best of 2026
The team behind Returnal kept the bullet-hell action, softened the punishment and sent Rahul Kohli to a planet that turns hostile in every eclipse. Saros scored 87 and quietly became Sony's best-reviewed game of the year.
When Housemarque released Returnal in 2021, it was a gamble: a brutally hard, full-price roguelike shooter as a PS5 launch-year exclusive. It scored 86 on Metacritic and won a devoted following, but plenty of players bounced off its punishing structure.
Saros is the Finnish studio's answer to those players. It launched on April 30, 2026, exclusively on PS5, and scored 87 on Metacritic from 136 reviews, with 91% of critics on OpenCritic recommending it. Among PlayStation's own studios, it is the best-reviewed new game of 2026 so far.
Welcome to Carcosa
The hero is Arjun Devraj, an enforcer of a group called Echelon IV, voiced by actor Rahul Kohli. He arrives on Carcosa, a planet littered with the ruins of an extinct alien civilisation, where the environment and wildlife become far more dangerous during eclipses.
Collecting Soltari Holograms reveals the planet's history piece by piece, an approach Housemarque used in Returnal to tell a story through fragments rather than cutscenes.
What is different from Returnal
The biggest change is progression that sticks. After each death, Devraj can permanently upgrade his loadout with new weapons and suit enhancements, so a bad run still moves you forward. That single change makes Saros much friendlier than Returnal, where most progress reset each time.
The combat keeps Housemarque's arcade roots: dense bullet-hell patterns, fast movement and a third-person camera. The new tool is the Soltari Shield, which blocks attacks and absorbs projectile energy. Stored energy can transform Devraj's right arm into the Carcosan Power Weapons, turning the enemy's own firepower into a counterattack.
What critics said
Reviews were strong across the board:
- Video Games Chronicle: 5/5
- Game Informer: 9.25/10
- GameSpot, Push Square, Shacknews: 9/10
- Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, The Guardian: 4/5
- IGN: 7/10
Critics singled out the combat, the shield mechanic and the sense of steady progress. The lower scores mostly felt the game was too close to Returnal in structure to feel like a real leap.
That split is worth understanding before you buy. If what you loved about Returnal was the tension of losing everything on a bad run, Saros deliberately removes some of it. If what kept you away was exactly that tension, this is the version of Housemarque's formula built for you. Either way, the moment-to-moment shooting is among the best on PS5.
How it compares
On Metacritic, Saros now sits ahead of several recent PlayStation exclusives, including Ghost of Yotei (86) and Marvel's Wolverine (75), and level with Insomniac's first Marvel's Spider-Man (87).
It runs on Unreal Engine 5, with music by composer Sam Slater, and it is a single-player game from start to finish.
Why it matters
PlayStation's 2026 has been uneven: Marvel's Wolverine disappointed critics, and God of War Laufey has just slipped to May 2027. Saros is the reminder that Sony's smaller studios still produce some of its best work, and that a mid-budget, focused action game can outscore a blockbuster.
WGC's take: if Returnal was too punishing for you, Saros fixes exactly that problem without losing what made it thrilling. It is the PS5 exclusive of 2026 to play first. Read more in our Wolverine story and our 2026 AAA year so far.