Saros gets a 2.5-hour free trial — but only for PS Plus Premium subscribers

Housemarque's PS5 roguelike shooter Saros now has a free trial, announced by the studio on its official X account. The catch: it's locked to PS Plus Premium, the top tier of Sony's subscription service at £15/$16 per month, and runs for two and a half hours.

The trial is one of the advertised perks of the Premium tier, but the timing makes the restriction feel pointed. Saros has reportedly been underperforming commercially since launch, with some analysts concerned the game may struggle to break even. Critics loved it — Eurogamer's Rick Lane called it "a tremendous action experience [whose] ambitious narrative gets lost in the fireworks" — but sales momentum has been slower than Returnal, Housemarque's 2021 predecessor, despite the PS5's much larger installed base in 2026. The £70/$70 price tag and Sony's recent PS5 hardware price hikes have likely contributed, as has a broader trend of players becoming more selective with spending amid worsening economic conditions globally. Given all that, locking the trial behind a premium paywall rather than opening it to all PS Plus tiers — or making it fully free — is a puzzling call.

Housemarque isn't panicking. In a recent interview, the studio pointed out that Returnal was a slow starter too. "This is just the start of the discussion and conversation with the gaming community," the developer said. "If you have played Saros, you know that there are a lot of things that we can do and tweak and add. We hope that we can keep on doing that for a while." Housemarque built its reputation on arcade-style, mechanically demanding games, and Returnal eventually found a large audience well after its launch window.

Whether the trial moves the needle remains to be seen. A two-and-a-half-hour window is substantial enough to get a real feel for the game's roguelike loop, but reaching only the highest-paying PS Plus subscribers limits how many new players it can actually convert.