Sony's new PS5 game Saros launched Thursday to strongly positive reviews, but its lead actor nearly handed players a completely different performance than the one they're hearing now.
Rahul Kohli, best known for his roles in Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass, voices Arjun Devraj, a Soltari enforcer navigating a shape-shifting alien world called Carcosa. The game is developed by Housemarque, the studio behind the 2021 cult hit Returnal, and is described as a spiritual successor to that title. Saros carries on Housemarque's signature bullet-hell gameplay, with players navigating wave after wave of hostile enemies on a planet full of dark secrets.
Kohli signed on to the project in 2023 after Housemarque approached him based on his work on Midnight Mass. His first instinct was to treat the role like a prestige screen performance. That instinct, he eventually concluded, was wrong.
"I'll just play these cut scenes for real, and I'll treat it exactly how I would approach a film or a TV show," Kohli told Variety. "And then I played it, and I'd been playing it for a while, and actually start to think I had made a mistake. I felt that I had unintentionally ignored the genre and why people are here."
Kohli said that every time he heard his character speak in the initial recording, the voice felt like it didn't belong in the world Housemarque had built. The game's design is rooted in arcade-shooter energy, complete with pounding music from composer Sam Slater and a premise built around the power fantasy of dying and returning stronger. A restrained, grounded vocal performance, Kohli felt, cut against all of that.
He brought the concern to Housemarque creative director Gregory Louden and proposed starting over. Louden agreed. "I ended up re-recording almost every line of dialogue," Kohli said. The new approach was deliberately more physical and action-forward. "I actually gruffed it up more, delivered a more kind of action-y performance that then slipped in nicely, because my ultimate goal with approaching this game and leading this game was I did not want to distract, I wanted to disappear."
Louden backed the decision. "I think it makes it even better for the player," he said. "And that was the goal, to be a sort of science-fiction world you get lost in."
Kohli is himself a serious gamer and completed the original Returnal after multiple attempts when it launched in 2021, which gave him a firsthand understanding of what Housemarque's fanbase expects. That context informed his second pass at the role more than any acting instinct did.
Saros is a single-player action game exclusive to PS5. Players new to the title this weekend are entering what the developer describes as a demanding bullet-hell environment, a challenge Housemarque has built its reputation around delivering.
