Salty Ambition

Back when Ska Studios launched Salt and Sanctuary in 2016, I was eager to give it a shot due to my enjoyment of their previous titles such as Dishwasher and my general interest for souls-likes.

What I found was a flawed but enjoyable 2D spin on the souls formulas and after completing the game, I wondered what a sequel could be like and hoped that they would make improvements to the solid foundation they have laid out.

Fast forward to over a half decade later when the sequel has finally been released and while I can respect this ambitious effort from a small indie team, I feel it is a step back in overall quality.

Here we go, Mage huntin’ again.

MSRP: $19.99
Platform: PC (Epic games store), PS4/PS5
Played on: PS5
Length: 30~ hours

The Marked Inquisitor is a condemned soul, fated to battle the powerful mages that has thrown the once peaceful kingdom into disarray. Without the luxury of a final death, the Inquisitor strikes out into the wilds to redeem himself by shedding the blood of his elemental foes.

As is the case with most souls-likes, there isn’t much of an emphasis placed on the overarching story in Salt and Sacrifice but it does the bare minimum of setting up the world and the stakes involved.

So with that in mind, let’s get to the most important aspect, the combat and character customization.

There are light and heavy attacks as well as a block and dodge. Any weapon can be used to block but their effectiveness in doing so varies depending on the weapon type and there is a perfect parry that can be triggered by blocking right before an attack hits. This can reduce the damage/stamina loss of blocking significantly as well as reduce the poise of enemies to allow for a critical strike but it’s mostly useful against regular enemies as bosses tend to have inflated poise.

The type of dodge I had access to varied depending on the weight of my armor with there being a rather large difference between the lightest roll being very quick and useful and the heaviest being slow and bordered on useless.

There is a good variety of different weapon types and armor that I could equip but to make use of them properly, I would need to unlock their respective skill nodes first. Spending hard earned salt to level up at a shrine gave me access to skill crystals which could be used to unlock skills on a grid. This was reminiscent of FFX’s sphere grid where I could choose different paths to follow and I was able to unlock the ability to use certain tiers of weapons/armor. Every few levels, I would also get a crystal that allowed me to reclaim a spent skill crystal from a specific node but honestly, I would’ve much preferred being able to fully reset my skills so I could try brand new builds.

Choosing a heavier class as a change of pace from my usual preference of lightweights worked against me this time.

As I started the adventure as a Warrior, I was stuck with the heaviest dodge roll for much of my playthrough which was an unpleasant experience and given how blocking against bosses was a quick way to run out of stamina and dying. I considered rerolling my character from scratch but with aggressive use of parrying, I was able to make it through until I increased my endurance enough to get to medium weight for a usable dodge.

There were also tools that I could locate in a level that would grant me access to new areas like a grappling hook or a zip-line but due to a lack of a map or even quick traveling, traversing these confusing and samey looking environments was a hassle and a half. Worse yet, during mage hunts, there were infinitely spawning phantom enemies that could spawn anywhere and having to chase the mages to different locations over and over just to actually trigger the boss fight became tedious fast.

If their inspiration came from Monster Hunter in terms of mage hunts, they are not understanding what makes those hunts so much fun. While it is true that the monster can run away to other areas during a hunt, it usually happens after several minutes, not seconds. A prepared hunter can also use various tools to prevent the monster from running away at all, killing it in the location where it was first discovered.

Also, as dropped items from mages are needed to craft new weapons/armor/accessories, it would make sense that I could refight them as needed but instead of having a straightforward quest list with difficulty modifiers, they come in the form of random dailys. Random mages, random difficulty.

Just, why? To add to the player retention and inflate the play time of the game?

If so, that’s the wrong way to go about it. I just wanted to farm a specific mage to upgrade my equipment but it just wasn’t to be.

This place looks familiar, have I been here before?

There were some technical issues I ran into during my playthrough including two hard crashes and a few soft locks where I ended up stucking in a wall or floor somewhere after using a grappling attack which required me to force quit out of the game.

The bosses have balancing issues as well as some attacks have almost no tell before it comes out and it’s common to get hit by one attack, get launched into the air and comboed to death from full health which is never fun.

It’s really a shame as I think the design of some of the bosses are really well done as is the sprite work in general. There’s also a good sense of atmosphere and exploring a new area for the first time can be a tense affair, barely making it to the next save point with one or two healing items left felt rewarding. Also, the various different types of multiplayer factions with their own tier of awards was fun to mess around with.

Everyone loves infinitely spawning adds right?

Salt and Sacrifice is a greatly ambitious title, melding a number of gameplay elements from other popular series but it comes at the cost of overall polish and focus, leaving a frustrating experience that feels like a step back from its predecessor.

Fun Tidbit – It’s worth noting that the developers have released patches to help address some of the issues noted in the review including crashes but most of the major ones including the way Mage fights work and lack of fast travel still remains. I hope they will continue to make changes to their game in the coming months.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.