The Saros gameplay trailer, revealed at the Sept. 24 State of Play livestream, made clear that developer Housemarque’s new game is bringing familiar elements from its predecessor, the 2021 sci-fi roguelike Returnal. This time, it seems like the studio is drinking from different creative wells to trap its protagonist, Arjun Devraj, in an alien bullet-hell loop. In this case, there’s an apparent connection between the game and the 19th-century book, The King in Yellow.
Arjun is stuck in a loop on Carcosa, a planet with tall buildings, alien tech ready to kill him, and a sky marked by eerily yellow sun rays. The mysterious planet hides unknown dangers. In the trailer, we see a giant humanoid creature. It has six arms, and in each of its hands, wields a sphere of fire. Crowned with a golden helmet, the eerie creature has its eyes covered by two other hands. This all looks frightening and exciting, but in the same enigmatic spirit Returnal portrayed since its first trailers. However, while we know close to nothing about what is happening in the game, it feels like Housemarque left a breadcrumb trail for fans to pursue.
“Carcosa” is a name that some might be familiar with. It appears in the first season of the TV show True Detective, and it has been incorporated into the Cthulhu mythos — originally created by H. P. Lovecraft — by August Derleth in his short story “The Return of Hastur.” However, the origin of Carcosa and the mythology behind it comes from the work of another author.
The mysterious nature of Carcosa is the heritage left by Robert W. Chambers, an American writer whose collection of short stories called The King in Yellow, first published in 1885, introduced this mythological place. The book is composed of 10 short stories, and four of them — “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In The Court of the Dragon,” and “The Yellow Sign” — feature characters interacting with the fictional play “The King in Yellow,” which leads people into madness if they dare to read its second act.
Chambers never disclosed what exactly happens in the play or what the cryptic elements he constantly mentions in the short stories, such as “Carcosa,” “The King in Yellow,” and the “Yellow Sign” really are. Part of what we learn throughout the book comes from brief comments made by the characters. They talk about how they have seen the King in Yellow or a list of names of men who have received the Yellow Sign. These mysterious elements are so integrated in the characters’ realities that they don’t waste time explaining them, which works perfectly for Chamber to leave us in the dark and create a horror atmosphere throughout his short stories.
The only direct piece of information Chambers left in his collection of shorts about what Carcosa is comes from a quote from the play that introduces the book. Indicated as being part of act one, scene two from the play, “Cassilda’s Song” is composed of four stanzas, describing a place called Carcosa as a location where twin suns, strange moons, and black stars mark the skies. There is a shore, making it a place next to a sea, and somewhere in Carcosa is where one can find the King.
The apparent connection between Saros and Chambers’s work goes beyond the simple act of naming the planet where the story seems to take place as “Carcosa.” The Saros announcement trailer, revealed at Sony’s February 2025 State of Play, showed Arjun lying on a beach with his face being hit by the tail end of waves from an unknown ocean. On his neck, you can see a yellow medallion. Once he stands up, the sun-like symbol on the medallion becomes more visible. An eclipse — a black star! — is happening, and from the mysterious water comes a giant humanoid figure with eight arms and what seems like a crown around its head.
While these are direct references to The King in Yellow‘s symbolic universe, it doesn’t mean that Saros is an adaptation of the short stories in some way. Although the elusiveness of the scenes described by Robert Chambers makes The King in Yellow and its surrounding canon an appealing mystery, they are strong metaphorical symbols, especially the focus on the color. According to journalist Carlos Orsi, responsible for the footnotes in the Brazilian edition of the book released in 2014, in 19th-century Western society, the color yellow represented decadence, immorality, and madness. By referencing Chamber’s work, Saros might be suggesting that Carcosa is an extension of Arjun, an exploration of himself, and his feelings.
At the same time, the word “Carcosa,” which Chambers borrowed from Ambrose Pierce’s 1886 short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” is connected to the unfamiliar and the wish of returning to where one belongs. In both trailers released by Housemarque, we hear Arjun talking to someone, saying he’s going to find them. Who is this dear person for whom the protagonist fights — and dies! — many times on a weird planet in order to find them?
It’ll be months before we can get any hard answers to these questions. Maybe I’m completely off-base, and Saros is nothing more than a game about shooting aliens. Knowing what the Housemaque folks pulled off with Returnal, which weaved a compelling narrative about an alien planet giving form and tentacles to an astronaut’s internal struggles, I can only imagine Saros will have a similarly intellectual depth. Carcosa awaits.
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