REVIEW

Salt and Sanctuary Review

by Sam Foxall, March 14th, 2016

Washing up on the shores of this cursed island, you can’t shake the feeling of déjà vu. Your sanctuary seems ever so familiar, the crumbling castles and fetid dungeons remind you of adventures you’ve taken long ago. While your weapons and armour look different, your mind drifts keeps drifting to thoughts of memories past as you play Salt and Sanctuary. You’ve done this all before.

This will be the feeling of many going into Salt and Sanctuary, that this Dark Souls-inspired action RPG lacks its own identity. Salt and Sanctuary does try to make this growing genre its own, but it either ends up making missteps which limit the player’s experience or just winds up falling back on tried and true mechanics. It does have its moments but when the many frustrating levels and bosses have you cursing at your screen, all you’ll want to do is to go back and play the games that inspired Salt and Sanctuary.

The Soulesian influence is writ large from the very moment you start Salt and Sanctuary, as you create your poor storm-tossed warrior in a manner similar to Dark Souls (right down to your starting trinket) and are thrown onto the cursed isle after fighting through a very short opening sequence on a ship. You read notes in bottles on how to use the game’s controls, rather than reading glowing messages carved into the ground and you eventually seek refuge in a Sanctuary, instead of round a bonfire. There is no real explanation of the world that you are in, you only know that you arrived here after your ship crashed and that you must find the princess that you were ferrying across the ocean, so that you can complete your mission of having her foster peace between two warring nations. The Soulslike mystery is supposed to kick in once you’ve reached the first Sanctuary but it feels more contrived than anything. Salt and Sanctuary is trying to emulate the atmosphere evoked by the Souls games, so much so that even its menus look the same. I understand trying to establish a link with fans that may be trying the game out due to its similarity with Souls but it just feels like pandering more than anything else, wearing the face of another series to entice fans in and then revealing something which doesn’t progress past being a homage to Souls. So, with little knowledge on your quest, you set out from the first Sanctuary to find the princess by defeating some bosses on the way. Even as you progress, you get no real sense of an overarching story like in Dark Souls, it just feels like a series of familiar themed zones with no real narrative through line to tie them all together.

Get used to dealing with enemies coming at you from every conceivable angle.

It’s doubly disappointing as there are some clever shortcuts in between zones, with explorers being rewarded with special loot if they take the time to go back and explore an area, but the efficiency of the warp system means that you’ll only go back to explore when you have no idea where to go next. Having said that, each area is structured in such a way that it is rare to get lost in Salt and Sanctuary, as there is usually an NPC at the start and end of each zone to guide you on where to go next. The zones themselves feel like areas in a Castlevania game, where adventurers have to balance platforming and basic combat as they struggle towards the boss of that zone and the powerup or key they are guarding. Salt and Sanctuary does effectively replicate that Soulsevania feedback loop of initial exploration, getting destroyed by a tough enemy or obstacle, training up and eventually triumphing over that obstacle to reach the next Sanctuary ready for you to fight the boss. You do unlock shortcuts to help ease progression and you gain levels at a fairly regular rate, with you accruing regular doses of Salt as you kill enemies and defeat bosses. You will inevitably get quite salty when you get mullered by about 20 enemies ganging up on you at once or when you’re killed by fall damage when negotiating a tricky platforming section.

As Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D game, it has been forced to sacrifice a whole plane of movement which Dark Souls was able to play with, while still porting over much of its combat system. This means that when faced with a horde of enemies or a massive monster, you’ll more often than not get backed into a corner or be surrounded with no way to escape as your movement options are so limited. You do have the ability to jump however, which is something that you almost have to retrain you brain around if you come into Salt and Sanctuary as a Souls fan. Especially against bosses, remembering that you can just jump out of situations or over attacks does alleviate some of the frustration that will inevitably occur when you are duelling with a 50-foot monster made of torture cages. You do unlock some Castlevania-esque movement buffs like the ability to wall jump or run upside down at specific points but these are more for traversal, rather than combat.

While movement may not be as open, the combat system does feel incredibly fluid when you learn to chain your attacks together, knocking enemies up into the air and then juggling them with aerial strikes. You can feel remnants of the combat system from Dishwasher: Vampire Smile in Salt and Sanctuary, as remaining in the air with consecutive attacks can sometimes be the best strategy. There is the issue of attacks not feeling very weighty, partially due to the ability for you to leap around like an incredibly panicked flea and the fact that many enemies explode in clouds of blood when you kill them. Big enemies may seem imposing and powerful when barrelling towards you at full speed but when they explode like a gory piñata on death, they quickly lose their punch. When you are in a one on one fight, it can feel like two marionettes frantically bashing against each other, rather than two warriors duelling to the death. This is also due to the puppet-like animations of each character which can make combat look very stilted and janky at times.

You have your usual raft of magic and prayers to augment your fighting style alongside simply martial prowess, but Salt and Sanctuary’s levelling system takes a real step back when compared to the relative freedom in progression found in Dark Souls or even Symphony of the Night. Rather than you individually levelling stats like Strength and Endurance as you would in a Souls game, a level up grants you a Black Pearl which allows you to pick a point on the game’s skill tree which grants a certain bonus. The majority of points on the tree are your traditional stat ups while other nodes can increase your store of replenishing potions and give you access to higher level weapons. With this system, rather than reaching a set stat threshold in order to use a weapon, you must unlock the set node on the skill tree by following one of the many pathways. This locks you into certain avenues of growth and means you cannot use half of the weapons that you find in Salt and Sanctuary, unless you’ve unlocked that branch on the skill tree. If you picked the wrong skill tree branch or decided that you don’t really like axes over swords, you’ll have to waste multiple levels building up that direction of the skill tree in order to use that new weapon type or equip that spell. When you are already taking so much from the Souls series, it beggars belief why they would change its fantastic ability for you to play around with builds by locking you into set build paths via this skill tree system.

I’m sure those are just large knitting needles, instead of giant swords that could hack a man in half.

If this levelling seems poorly designed, you haven’t seen some of the bosses and areas, as they will have you wishing you were back in Anor Londo with those evil Silver Archers. The zones you travel though are very similar to those found in Castlevania (the castle, the lake, the forest, the creepy corpse filled dungeon etc) and like old school Castlevania, there is a tendency to chuck loads of flying enemies with small hitboxes at you to make precision platforming a nightmare. When you are desperately trying to claim your Salt off an enemy perched on a high platform and you have to deal with poison slime monsters who are impossible to see in trees or skeletons that dangle just out of reach of your weapon yet they are able to teleport grab you from off screen, your PS4 pad may go through a window. What’s worse is when precise platforming comes into play during a boss fight and you have to deal with the constant threat of instant death pits, while dodging both the boss’ attacks and flame jets which fire off while you are trying to platform. Combine this with said boss having a janky hitbox which requires you to be in the air and puts you at risk of being killed via fall damage if you miss an attack. This is not good boss design, this is an exercise in frustration. When I’m fighting the platforming and controls more than the actual boss, something is wrong.

There just seems to be a lack of polish to compliment with the lack of identity with Salt and Sanctuary. The world design is just a composite of old Castlevania levels and at no point was I really impressed with unique or grotesque enemy designs. I do want to know who hit all the NPCs in the face with a frying pan at birth as they have some squashed up faces. The sound design is just plain bad, with sound effects that would have seemed low quality back on the ZX Spectrum while the actual OST is mainly just indistinct screeching metal guitar interspersed with quiet classical guitar. It does the job but you’re never going to be wowed by the look or sound of Salt and Sanctuary.

Salt and Sanctuary occupies a tricky position, being a game designed to cater to a niche market who expect a super high level of quality when it comes to entries in their genre. It’s a shame then that while Salt and Sanctuary is a good game at its core, it hinders itself with frustrating platforming, odd design decisions and a forgettable aesthetic. You can tell Ska Studios are real Souls fans and they wanted to really make a game for the fans, but it misses the mark on all those little extra frills and as a result it doesn’t ascend past being an alright Soulslike.