Salt and Sanctuary

It's difficult for me to be completely unbiased as to recommending this game, as it definitely has a lot of shortcomings that sour the entire experience for new players, and even deterred me from playing it for a while. So, I will divide this review into three aspects: Gameplay, replayability, and mechanics. I will keep the lore out of this review in order to avoid spoiling the experience. ~ Gameplay ~ Quite easily the most entertaining part of this entire game. Sticks to the simple and bare essentials of souls-likes: You block, parry, dodge, and attack. Simple. S&S doesn't exactly stray horribly far from this formula, so, if you've ever played a soulslike, chances are you know damn well what you're getting into. Fighting enemies in this game feels a bit... Weird at first. You will often feel like you're just spamming them to death rather than engaging in a proper "dance" or exchange between them, which is only properly broken by enemies with shields, or horses, or ranged enemies. And this holds true for most of the game if you know what you're doing. Some enemies will fight you like DS PvP ragequitters; They'll find one attack that works and will spam it to death until you're d…

You can tank every boss in the game with a greatsword on first try and then repeatedly lose all the salt you've earned from them on another hideous leap-of-faith platforming. 12/10

Salt and Sanctuary does a pretty excellent job of faithfully recreating some of the best aspects of the first Dark Souls in particular. The metroidvania elements re-translate back into the 2D environment smoothly, as one would expect. The atmosphere and story/lore elements feel overly derivative to the point that for myself it wasn't exactly worth paying too much attention to the lore or story. There's a bestiary which is cool though, it's a nice inclusion and has some neat information. The combat and movement both feel good and the art design is fantastic. It feels and looks similar to a really good Newgrounds game, and I mean that in the absolute best kind of way, there is a simplicity to the entire experience which is approachable and a little bit nostalgic. Some of the only issues that I struggled with are that the map layout and navigation are not at all as intuitive as Dark Souls. In Dark Souls each area is so unique and the shortcuts and connections between each area are easily identifiable, easy to remember, and amazingly convenient, usually. It all results in an experience where you can think of an area that you want to go to, and can quickly start to come up with d…

Unfortunately I have to give a non recommendation because there is no "too hard" option. If you like souls-like games then this game is probably for you. For me personally as older player the beginning was fun but the second boss I gave up. Playing it trough with walktroughs and unlimited health still was fun for me.

hype moment aura game with "fun" and "consistent" boss design and 3000 projectile and flying enemies. an amazing world, art, and music squandered by a game made by shaking a magic 8 ball for every line of code. we got plushies of this game before yuki too, bummer.

if i think back on the 6 hrs of my playtime, more than half of it was pretty miserable due to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bosses, cheesy traps, probably the clunkiest feeling platforming ive ever seen in a metroidvania and having to navigate identical looking rooms without a map. feels like this game tried to emulate how dark souls games feel without actually considering how it would transfer to 2d