Housemarque, skaperne av Saros og Returnal, henter inspirasjon fra FromSoftware

This year, Housemarque, the studio previously known for their work on Returnal, released a new game also titled Saros. The game received high praise from both the gaming press and players, but its sales are reportedly underwhelming. In a recent interview, the developers discussed the studio’s future and shared examples of who inspires them and who they aspire to become over time.

Specifically, this refers to Ilari Kuittinen, the head and co-founder of Housemarque, who recently spoke with The Game Business. In his interview, he discussed how the studio has grown over the years in terms of staff expansion, the support from Saros, and how the developers drew inspiration from FromSoftware—a company that spent most of its active career creating niche games before releasing breakout hits like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. The highlights from his interview you can check out below:

“It’s quite different jumping into this scale of doing one game at a time with this amount of people. That’s been a big change in the studio to learn how to make these bigger experiences, and how to organize that.

FromSoftware have been doing a similar genre for a very long time and built up their fan base. We have two unique games out. Returnal, Saros. It’s kind of a new thing that you need to educate the market about, so that people say, ‘Hey, these flow states are really cool. FromSoftware’s journey from King’s Field to what they are today… We’re not presuming that we would be anywhere close to that. But we will keep our core, keep educating the market that these are the coolest game you can play. That’s our goal.”

In the same interview, Kuittinen teased that Housemarque's next project might not be as large-scale as Saros, as the studio is exploring different ways to make their games unique. You can check out his words below:

“We just pinch ourselves… are we dreaming that we’re given this opportunity to create this thing? A new game, new IP with these resources? But we are quite grounded as well. We were 26 years as an independent, just managing to survive and moving from one game to another. Right now, we are talking about how to proceed with Saros and discussing with the community. But then, of course, what we should do in the future? There are interesting opportunities we’d like to look at that might not be at the scale of Saros. There are so many things that we want to explore, and we will find whether it’s possible or not.”

Saros is the sci-fi third-person action RPG set in the future. You play as Soltari enforcer Arjun Devrai, and alongside your crew, the task is to explore the planet of Carcosa, where the human colony vanished. Carcosa is also in a state of perpetual eclipse, which distorts reality and directly influences gameplay and the plot. The game is now available exclusively on PlayStation 5.