Carcosa, the mysterious planet setting of sci-fi shooter Saros, owes me answers. Why do its eclipses drive my stranded crewmates to violence? What's with all the hands? Who built the planet's vast alien structures, and why are they abandoned? Seriously, what's with all the hands?
Whenever protagonist Arjun activates an eclipse, spectral hands reach from pools of molten sunlight to grasp him. Hands are carved obsessively into the stonework of Carcosa, while the game's cover art shows a many-armed creature sprawled before the sun. Of the many mysteries that Housemarque lays out in Saros' opening hours, its handsy motif piques my interest the most – so when I had a chance to catch up with art director Simone Silvestri, Carcosa's noodly mitts had to come up eventually.
The hand(s) that feed
Saros review: "A lean fusion of roguelike sci-fi action and eldritch horror that successfully remixes Returnal for a broader audience"
Silvestri pleads partial innocence. "I didn't set out to put so many hands in the game, but the more we were talking with the artists, the more it felt like a right fit," he says, pointing to Saros' "central" themes of greed.
"The game is about grasping for power, about having this immense greed for something more, and something that, sometimes, you can't have," Silvestri continues. Those themes extend to the architecture of Carcosa's forebears: many of their stone carvings begin eloquently before sprawling haphazardly upwards, eventually losing their shape – a mass of hands, all reaching for the sky.
The abandoned ruins of Carcosa offered Housemarque's art team a chance to show, not tell, the eclipse-worshipping civilization's relationship with the planet. "We coined this term called 'twisted enlightenment' which means that, yes, they are enlightening themselves by letting the eclipse in - literally by shredding their bodies sometimes - but that enlightenment is actually making you into a monster, rather than a wiser person.
"With that came the idea of the architecture," the director continues. "When we started I wanted to try neoclassicism, because it's an architecture of worship. It had this massive scale that works really well for our gameplay and this quiet detail and all of these shapes. But it was so soft and so friendly that it didn't work. We had [this idea of] violent beauty, so we wanted to have that violence. So we fused Italian futurism with the works of Sant'Elia and even painters like Depero, and together with the mega-structures of Etienne Louis Boulay, we created this language of alien fusion."
By this point, the hands were a part of something much grander. The resulting style created "very vertical, sharp, violent lines," which in turn fed into Saros' moment-to-moment action. "It works really well for gameplay because you move really fast, and it feels good to move through these lines," Silvestri adds. "So the more we pushed the theme, the more we realized this is what the gameplay is talking about. And the narrative was reinforcing all of this. To me, this is the trademark of good games: when these three disciplines are doing the same thing."
I had no idea that asking about hands would lead to such a fascinating glimpse into game development, but getting to hear how Saros' visual identity was born and iterated is a treat. Over 100 creatives had to align on one vision to create Saros, and at any point, a different decision could have led to it being unrecognizable to the one we're playing today. Games, huh? You've gotta hand it to 'em.
