Ling: A Road Alone

“ARCADE IS DEAD,” developer Housemarque abruptly decreed in all caps on its blog shortly after Matterfall’s release in 2017.This candid manifesto explained how the team saw no future developing the arcadey games it had specialized in for over two decades and was moving onto different genres. Returnal was the result of this shift in focus, taking the aesthetics and chaos inherent to Housemarque’s house style and throwing it all into a roguelike third-person shooter. It was a cult hit that saw critical acclaim, but Saros, Returnal’s spiritual sequel, seems to rebuke that glorious foundation by s