[Edited: I fixed a typo in this review, and that edit reset its votes. I didn't realize that would happen. My apologies to the raters. It won't happen again]
Salt and Sanctuary is a Dark Souls-inspired 2D metroidvania, and one of the worst gaming experiences I ever had. I don't even know why I finished this game. Maybe it was the misguided idea that I payed for it, so I should beat it.[Edited: I fixed a typo in this review, and that edit reset its votes. I didn't realize that would happen. My apologies to the raters. It won't happen again]
Salt and Sanctuary is a Dark Souls-inspired 2D metroidvania, and one of the worst gaming experiences I ever had. I don't even know why I finished this game. Maybe it was the misguided idea that I payed for it, so I should beat it. Maybe it was a sense of resentment so deep, that it could only be amended by the cathartic "Eat this!" of beating the final boss. In any case, I felt relieved when I reached the credits and knew that I'll never play this game again.
Mind you, Salt and Sanctuary isn't an extremely though game. It's actually on the easy side compared to the similarly inspired Hollow Knight, that I enjoyed immensely. Instead of being hard, however, Salt and Sanctuary choses to be insanely frustrating. It's marred by a number of regretful design decisions that add up to a laundry list of how *not* to design a game. Here are a selected few:
- S&S involves a huge amount of stats, skills, weapons, and items. In theory, that should allow you to tackle the game in many different styles. In practice, some combinations just don't work, and lure you into a dead end. After ~7 hours, I had to abandon my first playthrough, because I'd chosen a setup that made it impossible to pass a mandatory room. Short of getting info from the Internet, I had no way of knowing that beforehand. I just had to bite the bullet and start from scratch with a different setup–that made the “unpassable” room ridiculously easy. I heard other players who got into same exact situation, where the game punishes you for trusting its systems.
- Like in many games, falling from a height does zero damage until a certain height–above that, you get incremental damage. In S&S, however, that damage scales so fast, that you go from “not even a scratch” to “ah, ah, you're dead” across a tiny range. Should you jump down from that platform? Do you feel lucky?
- Most of your character's attack/defense/heal animations cannot be interrupted, and some last for *seconds*. I died hundreds of time while waiting for my input to register. The game has an encumbrance system that makes your character more responsive if you go around naked. I ended up fighting all the late bosses in my underwear, without any kind of armor, shield, or large weapon, just to shave some lag off the horribly unresponsive controls. Some people call that kind of high-latency control “deliberate”. I call it “crap”.
- The game's idea of a challenge involves littering the map with traps that are made invisible by the muddy graphics and extreme darkness of some areas. In some cases, those traps are placed on purpose to drop you from a height and instakill you. Ah, ah, you're dead again. Ah.
- Some levels demand precise platforming, and then make that impossible with confusing graphics that smear the edges of platforms. So you fell and died *again* while aligning a hard jump? Back to the spawn point for you.
- There is a very common scenario where you get hitstunned by a small enemy, and then slowly die through a series of uninterruptible hitstuns. You can only watch in impotent pain as your full health bar slowly gets sipped to zero. Just watch and suffer. I mean, you got hit once, you deserve to die.
- Some bosses, and *even regular enemies*, one-hit kill you. Sometimes. When they want to.
- One late-game boss is the worst designed boss I ever fought in a game. (Yes, I'm talking about *that* boss). One of its techniques has been called the “decide to win” attack: it flies off screen, where you cannot follow her or track her tells, and one-shot kills you from there. Many players pass it by trying dozens of times, until they get a lucky fight where it doesn't use those cheap attacks.
I could go on. And on.
The sad part is that I wanted to like this game. It's clearly a labour of love. I respect the tiny indie team that developed it, and I liked their earlier work. I also love the hand-drawn graphics, even though it's often hard to parse. Some of the boss fights are good, and some are even very good. Because of all those factors, I don't feel like giving Salt and Sanctuary anything less than 3. If I had to judge on how pleasant it was as a gaming experience, however, it'd probably be a 1. Negative.
To make things worse, I saw people posting for hints on this game's Reddit and getting abused by pedantic “git gud” types. If there's anything more annoying than hitstuns it's these guys. That comically stuffy attitude is not the game's fault, but it does make the game harder to recommend. Enemies one-hit kills you? “Git gud, learn not to get close”. You keep dying by falling off a platform? “Git gud, don't drop off platforms”. You die? "Git gud, don't die".
I have better advice for you: git gud, don't play Salt and Sanctuary.… Expand
Salt and SanctuaryYour Score0 out of 10User Score
