SAROS

From: Sony / Housemarque

For: PS5

★★★★

I hate run-backs.

You know the deal — there’s some boss somewhere that’s likely to kill you a bunch of times, but rather than put the restart point immediately before that fight so you can just jump back into it, the developers maddeningly choose to put it further back so you have to run repeatedly through the same two- or five- or 10-minute (I want to throw the controller at this point) sequence of the game just to earn the chance to get killed again.

So Housemarque managing to get me to have a good time with Saros — a game that is almost entirely run-backs — is some pretty good going.

The Finnish studio has made a bit of name for itself in that stressful dimension known as bullet hell, from early titles like the stylish platformer Outland to the more recent, early-PS5-era third-person shooter hit Returnal .…