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

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Gaming Close Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gaming Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Follow Follow See All Report With Saros, Housemarque makes a case for doing next-gen games differently ‘Realism is not interesting to pursue,’ and other lessons from the PlayStation studio. by Joshua Rivera Close Joshua Rivera Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Joshua Rivera Apr 30, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances.

Technical Details

We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this — books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. 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?

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 .

Industry Implications

They’d be good if they didn’t look as sharp, but it’s cool that they did. Related Saros is pure action nirvana Saros reminded me how great the DualSense can be Saros , the studio’s latest game , operates on a similar principle. Like Returnal , Housemarque’s 2021 PlayStation Studios debut , it’s another classic arcade-style game reimagined from the perspective of Sony labelmates like God of War or Horizon .

It has an eye for dramatic genre storytelling and lavish presentation but without the obsessive pursuit of realism that can define conversation around those games. “To me, realism is not interesting to pursue,” says Saros lead artist Simone Silvestri. “ Saros is a stylized, realistic game, which makes sure that we can bend the world to the crazy gameplay that we have.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.