When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and thePlayStationhouse style is beginning to seem a lot like a hammer.Housemarque, whichunveiled its new game Saros during this week’s State of Play, is the latest studio to inadvertently become the nail.
Sony Makes Games In One Genre Now
Those were my slightly unfair thoughts upon seeing the upcoming third-person shooter, which is slated for a 2026 launch. I say that my thoughts wereslightlyunfair because all we got wasa CGI trailer— which can’t tell you much about what the actual game will look and feel like in action — plus 40-ish seconds of the game’s creative director, Gregory Louden, discussing the team’s vision for Saros. But having seen what’s happened to most of Sony’s first-party developers, I think it’s unlikely Saros isn’tbasicallywhat I expect it to be.
That’s because, over the past decade or so, Sony has transformed the majority of its studios into the same thing. PlayStation once had a diverse slate of games that targeted different audiences. Guerillamade first-person shooters. Santa Monicamade character action games. Insomniac made games in a wide variety of genres, from action-platformers likeRatchet & Clankto sci-fi FPSes likeResistance, while developing casual games like Fruit Fusion and VR titles likeStormlandfor other platforms.
But Sony now only really offers various flavors of third-person action. Sometimes it’s third-personstealthaction, likeThe Last of Us Part 2. Sometimes it’s third-personmultiplayeraction, likeHelldivers 2. Sometimes it’s third-person actionadventure, likeGod of War Ragnarok. And sometimes it’s third-personopen-worldaction, likeSpider-Man 2. But the perspective and focus remain similar. When games can be so many things, it’s a bummer to see this one paradigm become so prevalent.
How Sony Gave Up On Variety
It’s easy to see this change occur if you look back at what the studios behind Sony games used to make. The first Helldivers was a top-down shooter, for example, and Housemarque made arcade-y shooters like Resogun, Alienation, and Nex Machina. For Returnal, Housemarque switched to a more cinematic, third-person approach. Its roguelite gameplay still made it an outlier by Sony standards, but it was a far cry from the studio’s previous work.
And, again, with Saros, Housemarque is going back to that same well, with Louden saying that the game “builds on Returnal’s award-winning third-person action”. There’s a lot to like here. The trailer’s conclusion, with a giant, eight-armed figure towering over the protagonist as the sun dies in the background is pretty cool. It’s rad to see Rahul Kohli, a British Indian actor, stepping into the hero role in a triple-A game (even if that character looks like the same gruff, bearded soldier type we’ve seen a hundred times). Returnal’s heroine was a middle-aged woman, and I respect Housemarque immensely for working to represent a broader spectrum of humanity in its games — especially at a time when a game starring a person with a marginalized identity tends to get it noticed by the worst people on the internet.
And, honestly, I like third-person action games more than the kinds of games Housemarque was making before. This is a win for me. I’ll play Saros and I’ll probably like it because I like third-person action games. But variety is a good thing. I loveNaughty Dogas much as the next person, but so many of Sony’s studios chasing The Last of Us' gritty gameplay and somber tone is a creative dead end. Sony is only hurting itself by defining what a ‘PlayStation game’ can be this narrowly. It’s a loss for the industry when everything gets the hammer.
