Saros and Pragmata show that video-game-ass video games are back

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I’m probably about to fall into a classic trap of culture journalism — misidentifying a random coincidence as a trend — but bear with me, because I really do think there’s something to it. Honest!

This week sees the release of Saros, Housemarque’s new PlayStation 5 exclusive. Like its predecessor Returnal, it’s an action game defined by a roguelike-style run structure and by sinister horror vibes. In other words, it couldn’t be more 2026 if it tried.

And yet: Saros is also a sci-fi game in which a dude runs around shooting a laser gun. There’s something timeless and comfortingly old-school about it. That’s even more true of the previous big release on PS5 (and Xbox, and everything else), which arrived two weeks ago: Capcom’s Pragmata.

Image: Housemarque/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Pragmata, despite a storyline involving an AI takeover, doesn’t feel as influenced by current trends as Saros, partly because it was developed over a long time and partly because it recalls — intentionally, I think — the risk-taking Capcom Five era of the early 2000s. It has some original twists, but at its heart it’s a refreshingly straightforward, evil-robots-and-moon-bases, dude-shooting-a-laser-gun game.

The sci-fi shooter has been a cornerstone of video gaming throughout the entire life of the medium. You can argue that it is the originating genre of video games, dating all the way back to 1962’s Spacewar! But these games have been scarce recently, especially in the single-player realm. Halo, the great sci-fi shooter juggernaut of the 21st century, is a spent force — for now, at least.

Graphic: Marloes Valentina Stella/Polygon | Source image: Capcom via Polygon

Can we infer anything from the sudden arrival of two relatively high-profile, big-budget, single-player sci-fi shooters on the scene? Well, yes, of course we can if we want to, but should we? Debatable. There’s not much evidence that other publishers are about to jump on this bandwagon (although rumors of a Starfox revival at Nintendo are interesting). Pragmata has sold well enough that Capcom is hinting it has a future as a franchise, but the jury’s still out on Saros.

But the juxtaposition of these two games — both handsome to look at, both exciting to play — does give us an opportunity to revel in a gaming aesthetic that was once ubiquitous to the point of boredom, and now has an almost rarefied authenticity.

Saros has a very Sony cinematic sheen but it also conjures swirling storms of plasma fire straight from the 2D bullet-hell shmups of yore. Housemarque is summoning the spirit of the hardest of hardcore games: titles like Treasure’s Ikaruga that are spoken of with reverence and fear by those who really know.

Pragmata, with its lonely spaceman adopting an android child, has elements of 2010s dadcore. But its hard futurism, gleaming surfaces, mechanical enemies, and intentionally repetitive save-point structure aren’t interested in any humanising narrative or cinematic continuity. They acknowledge and celebrate the machine-like qualities of video games.

It’s thrilling to be presented with two big, bold video games that aren’t afraid to be video games — that actively and unapologetically seek to channel the rawest, oldest, most undiluted spirit of the form. Pew and, indeed, pew.

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