You know the feeling. You load into a run confident, you dodge the first three waves on instinct, and then a boss volley you've never seen before turns your screen into a strobe light and sends you back to the start screen in about four seconds. You sit there for a moment. And then you immediately start another run. That loop — death as fuel, mastery as reward — is what Housemarque perfected with Returnal in 2021, and what Saros is about to refine when it hits PS5 on April 30, 2026. But what do you play between now and then? And what fills the gap after Saros has devoured your next two weekends?
The roguelite genre has exploded in the last few years, but most lists default to Hades II and Dead Cells the second you mention the word "runs." This list goes further. These seven games share the specific DNA that makes Returnal and Saros so compelling: precise third-person or twin-stick action, an atmosphere thick enough to choke on, progression that makes every death feel earned rather than wasted, and a loop so well-designed you resent yourself for having to sleep. Hades is mentioned below because it genuinely belongs, but there are four titles here you probably haven't given the time they deserve.
Before anything else on this list, you should play Returnal — or play it again. Housemarque's 2021 PS5 launch title is the direct ancestor of Saros, and understanding what it got right (and what it refused to compromise on) makes Saros more legible and more exciting. Selene Vassos is trapped in a time loop on planet Atropos, waking up to her own corpse each run, and the narrative mystery threads through her dead-drop audio logs in a way that's genuinely haunting if you're paying attention. The bullet patterns here are brutally demanding; biome one alone has sent more players to the credits screen than the game itself. The PC version added co-op support, which is a completely different way to experience the same world. If Saros is the "come back stronger" version, Returnal is the game that made you earn the right to feel anything.
The Saros Connection: Same developer, same philosophy — the definitive entry point into Housemarque's bullet ballet, and required context for everything Saros is trying to evolve.
Hades II
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X/S · Switch
The Genre King
Supergiant's sequel to the best roguelite ever made is, somehow, already better than the original — and the original set the bar for an entire decade of action roguelites. Hades II puts you in the boots of Melinoë, daughter of Hades and sister to Zagreus, pursuing the titan Chronos through procedurally generated Greek myth with an expanded cast of boons, companions, and weapons that dwarf the first game's already generous selection. Where Returnal isolates you in existential dread, Hades II buries you in story; every failed run unlocks new dialogue, new relationships, and new pieces of a narrative that's more emotionally layered than most full-price RPGs. The isometric twin-stick combat doesn't have the third-person aggression of Saros, but the moment-to-moment flow state it induces — parrying, dodging, chaining boons — is the closest any 2D game has come to matching Housemarque's bullet ballet. For players who found Returnal's runs too punishing but still want an action roguelite that respects their time and rewards mastery, this is the first stop.
The Saros Connection: Permanent progression, layered storytelling across runs, and a loop so well-tuned it turns failure into anticipation rather than frustration.
03
Third-Person Action Roguelite
If you want to scratch the third-person action itch that Returnal opened up while waiting for Saros to land, Remnant II is the closest structural cousin on the market. Gunfire Games' sequel takes a Soulslike skeleton — stamina, dodge timing, brutal boss design — and wraps it in a procedurally generated third-person shooter across multiple bizarre worlds, from a dark fantasy kingdom to an alien insect civilization. Bosses have hidden alternate forms and kill conditions that change entirely based on random world generation, meaning two players can discuss the same encounter and realize they fought completely different versions of it. The archetype system lets you mix and match class abilities mid-run, and the three-player co-op makes the already replayable campaign wildly unpredictable. It's messier than Returnal and slower than Saros, but for players hungry for a third-person shooter roguelite with genuine boss artistry and a world that refuses to repeat itself, Remnant II delivers across seventy-plus hours without breaking a sweat.
The Saros Connection: Third-person shooter combat, procedurally generated encounters, and boss designs that demand you read the room on every attempt.
04
Twin-Stick Bullet Hell
Before Returnal, before the cinematic ambitions and the PS5 hardware showcase, Housemarque made Nex Machina — a blistering twin-stick arcade shooter made in collaboration with legendary game designer Eugene Jarvis. It is loud, violent, neon-drenched, and utterly relentless for approximately two hours. Each of the six worlds escalates enemy density, projectile complexity, and spatial chaos in ways that still hold up nearly a decade later. There's no roguelite loop, no meta-progression — just score runs, leaderboards, and a mastery curve as steep as anything in the genre. Playing Nex Machina gives you an X-ray view of the design philosophy Housemarque has carried through to Returnal and now Saros: every enemy placement is deliberate, every bullet pattern is readable once you stop panicking, and moving through a room efficiently is its own kind of art. Essential for understanding where the studio's bullet ballet started.
The Saros Connection: Pure Housemarque DNA — the arcade-shooter roots that every enemy encounter in Returnal and Saros traces back to.
What ties the best games in this space together isn't difficulty — it's intentionality. Each of these games makes you feel like every system was placed there specifically to teach you something, and the satisfaction of finally learning it is the loop. That's the philosophy Saros is doubling down on with its permanent progression: the world changes, you change with it, and neither of you goes back to zero. It's a shift that signals something larger happening across the genre right now — a movement away from pure punishment toward structured revelation, where the run isn't just a retry but a renegotiation.
Motion Twin's 2D action roguelite remains one of the finest examples of feel-first game design in the genre, and after years of expansions — culminating in the frankly spectacular Return to Castlevania crossover — the base game is now surrounded by enough content to justify weeks of play. What Dead Cells trains you in, without ever explicitly saying so, is attack timing, parry windows, and build synergy — the same three pillars that define Returnal's and Saros's combat. The 2D perspective makes the enemy telegraph reading slightly more forgiving, but the moment you start chaining parries and crits on a well-rolled weapon build, the flow state it produces is startlingly close to the one Housemarque manufactures. The Castlevania DLC adds a whole second interconnected world, a phenomenal Simon Belmont boss fight, and music that will get stuck in your head for the rest of the week. For players who bounced off Returnal's third-person controls but want to build the instincts the game demands.
The Saros Connection: Teaches the parry-and-punish rhythm and the build-synergy thinking that Saros's shield absorption mechanic rewards most heavily.
Sifu
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X/S
The Attitude Adjustment
Sifu isn't a bullet hell game, and it isn't a shooter, but it belongs on this list because it delivers the same specific emotional experience: the moment you stop fighting the game and start truly reading it, everything snaps into clarity and becomes beautiful. Sloclap's kung-fu brawler ages you each time you die — starting as a young student and becoming an old master if you're not precise enough — and this mechanic forces you to engage with a cost system that punishes reliance on brute-force recovery while rewarding disciplined positioning. Every room in Sifu is a puzzle with limbs, and the game teaches you boss patterns through repeated exposure in a way that maps directly onto how Returnal trains you through its biomes. A masterpiece of "the run is the tutorial." For players who loved Returnal's tone of quiet determination in the face of impossible odds and wanted more of that feeling packaged in a completely different genre.
The Saros Connection: The same philosophy of pattern mastery over stat inflation, and a death mechanic that makes every loss structurally meaningful rather than arbitrary.
07
Atmospheric Action Roguelite
Moonscars is the most criminally underplayed game on this list, and arguably the one that most purely captures Returnal's specific brand of atmospheric dread in a 2D action roguelite. Black Mermaid's debut game stars Grey Irma, a clay warrior who wakes in a dying world to find she is only one of many copies of herself, each abandoned by her creator. If that premise sounds like it was assembled from the same nightmare engine as Returnal's time-loop mystery, that's because the developers clearly understand what makes existential horror compelling in a gameplay context. The Soulslike combat is deliberate and punishing — a wrong parry timing staggers you into a second hit that's almost always lethal — and the world design has a hand-painted quality that makes every new area feel like stepping into a corrupted illuminated manuscript. The atmosphere of dread and isolation it sustains is rare, even among games three times its budget. For players who finished Returnal, sat in silence for a few minutes afterward, and then wondered what else could make them feel that way.
The Saros Connection: A protagonist trapped in a loop of death and identity collapse, a world that withholds its secrets, and a combat system that genuinely punishes complacency.
The Bottom Line
What the best bullet-hell roguelites prove — from Returnal to Hades II to what Saros is building — is that death isn't the problem to be solved. It's the point of the whole exercise. The loop only works if dying teaches you something, and the games that get that right are the ones you still think about six months after you've put them down. Saros's "come back stronger" system is a philosophical statement as much as a mechanical one: it believes in the player's capacity to learn, and it's designed to reward that capacity every single time.
★ Also Worth Your Time
Once you've cleared everything above, consider Gunfire Reborn (a first-person shooter roguelite with a surprisingly deep build system), Risk of Rain 2 (the third-person co-op roguelite that defined a genre), and Selaco — an old-school FPS roguelite built on GZDoom that plays like a fever dream where Quake and System Shock had a very productive argument.
Start Your Run
The games that stay with you longest are the ones that believe failure has something to say. Which run finally broke through for you — and is there a bullet hell or action roguelite we've criminally left off this list that deserves its moment? Drop it in the comments.
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