The Therapist Gamer

There really is no better way to describe Salt and Sanctuary than to say that it's like Dark Souls, but in 2D.  The similarities are numerous and the developers themselves said they were heavily inspired by Dark Souls.  The feel of the environments are not nearly as varied as in Dark Souls, but the overall tone is quite dark and grimy.  Death abounds.  The combat is not quite as complex as Dark Souls but overall it is exacting and difficult.  You will not get through Salt and Sanctuary any easier than you'll get through Dark Souls.  There are a variety of weapons and items, and there are traditional RPG mechanics with the progression system.  You could choose to play the game as a knight, archer, thief, mage, etc. and the game caters to a variety of play-styles.  It's actually quite impressive from a game design point of view.

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The gameplay loop in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls games is present.  You earn experience (salt) from each kill which is used to upgrade your weapons and stats, but you lose it all if you die.  If you can make it back to your salt then your death was not in vain and you can have it back, but if you die without recovering the lost salt then it is lost forever.  Rather than the bonfires that act as checkpoints in the Souls games, this game has sanctuaries.  Sanctuaries are simply rooms devoid of monsters, and you recover your health and healing items when you kneel at an altar.  However, if you do this then all of the enemies come back.  Each sanctuary can be devoted to one of a number of deities, and if you are aligned with deity of the sanctuary then you get special bonuses.  

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Like the Souls games there are a wide variety of enemies and bosses, each with their own combat style that you'll need to overcome.  The game designers understand that part of the joy of games is figuring out how to play and how to overcome the obstacles placed before you.  The bosses are numerous.  A lot of the bosses in the Souls games are a bit generic but there are some real standouts, like Smough and Ornstein.  Salt and Sanctuary has some great boss fights too but none of them really stand out as exceptional or highly memorable.  Without the comparison to Dark Souls you may not notice this, however. 

 

The bosses are cleverly designed but clearly have weaknesses and strengths to certain play styles.  This makes sense from a design point of view but what this leads to is that certain bosses will be very easy and other bosses will be almost impossible.  For example, I played with a slow character with a huge shield that could block anything.  I found magic bosses easy but it was almost impossible to defeat bosses who had high defense against physical force. 

 

Some aspects of the gameplay were very obscure and difficult to understand.  The story I'm about to tell will make me sound like an idiot, but might I remind you that I've played quite a few video games and imagine that others might fall into the same difficulty I did.  So the first sanctuary you find is devoted to "the three" and has a certain appearance.  Soon after you find another sanctuary devoted to someone else and the appearance is much different - it's part of learning that you can change the alignment of the sanctuaries.  Well, I was getting on in the game and it seemed like an extremely rare occurrence to find a sanctuary.  Like, three to four times as rare as it is to find a bonfire in Dark Souls.  "Wow, this game really is tough and unforgiving," I thought.  I could see that clever shortcuts were available (like in Dark Souls), but even still the bosses seemed very far away from the sanctuaries and it was a pain to go through them every time just for another shot at the boss.  Well, it turns out that I had been passing sanctuaries without even knowing it!  There were things that looked like treasure chests but I couldn't interact with them.  I figured that later on I'd get an item and find something cool in all of these places.  But it turns out that you're supposed to use specific items at these things and it turns the room into a sanctuary.  Wow, the game got a lot easier after that!  I felt dumb, but honestly I think the game design is somewhat at fault as well.  It should have said something like "Use XXXX item to turn this room into a sanctuary."  It just wasn't clear what I was supposed to do, and I bet a lot of people have had a similar problem.

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One other issue is that the upgrade system is absurdly complex and should be simplified.  I have a screenshot of it so you can take a look.  It just shows you every conceivable upgrade in a single screen and it's just way too crowded.

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All in all, I think Salt and Sanctuary is a great game.  It does have shortcomings, however, that might hold back even fans of the Souls series.  All in all, though, it's an amazing recreation of the Souls gameplay in a 2D format, and I look forward to the sequel.