My time with Salt & Sanctuary.

I have had Salt & Sanctuary installed on my PC for a long time and never gotten around to playing it. I was hesitating for some reason, either a fear that I wasn’t going to be good enough to play it or of perhaps their addictive quality. A week or so ago I dived in and sure enough this ‘Soulslike’ has absorbed all my gaming time. 

I dislike the term ‘Soulslike’ as for me it’s often so vague and doesn’t always mean that the qualities that made the Dark Souls games so captivating are present. A game can call itself Soulslike for only having a mechanic that punishes you on death for example and share no other similarities whatsoever. Lords of the Fallen would be a good example of this. For me what made Dark Souls and Bloodborne so amazing were the combination of a whole host of different features, themes, mechanics and ideas.

I think I’m about halfway through and in my opinion this is one of the better Soulslike games out there. By that I mean it feels the most like Dark Souls, in fact it was called the 2D Dark Souls in a number of reviews and I think it’s mostly gotten there. In terms of atmosphere, interconnected level design, music, upgrade systems, combat and scope it feels like Dark Souls. I feel desperate to make it to the next sanctuary to not lose my acquired salt, I feel the dread of every new area and boss and the greed for the last strike to down a boss where I should jump back and heal. 

One way in which the game isn’t quite up to the mark is in the lore. Some of the Dark Souls lore has been the most beautiful storytelling I’ve come across in gaming. Perilously close to Tolkienian levels of depth. I’m not saying there is no lore in S&S but I’ve not discovered anything that comes close to even the more minor plotlines in Dark Souls or Bloodborne such as Pinwheel or Gascoigne. 

I don’t particularly find the bosses to be that difficult either. Many of them so far have been a case of equipping the right items and stat effects and being ultra aggressive, very rarely have I come across a boss that has taken me more than 3 attempts. Compare that with the Orphan of Kos from Bloodborne, the Fume Knight from Dark Souls or the Demon of Hatred from Sekiro and you’re dealing with bosses that are difficult even with late game knowledge and items. Many other 2D side-scrolling games have far higher levels of challenge and don’t call themselves Soulslike and yet one that does is frustratingly lacking in that key identifier. 

I’ll complete it and enjoy it and think fondly of it, but I don’t think I’ll ever replay it. Which is fine, not every game has to be a masterpiece, but I think by adopting or allowing the comparison with Dark Souls you are, in a way, elevating the expectations of the players. 

I’ll shortly be reviewing a game called Torment: Tides of Numenera which shares the same flaw. The game was advertised as a spiritual successor for Planescape: Torment, my favourite game of all time and by attaching that reputation it fails in living up to it. An expectation I wouldn’t have even had if they had just called the game Tides of Numenera. It’s a subtle thing but it shifts your position from which to think about the game. Call a game a Soulslike and I’ve come down from the top with expectations I won’t fall far. Let me approach a game from below and I’ll likely feel more positive coming up to it. 

Salt and Sanctuary draws heavily from Dark Souls and that is both a blessing and a curse, it gets very close and probably would have been better for taking more of a sidestep away from the Souls series. I think it is a really good entry place for anyone looking to get into Dark Souls that has been too cautious to do so. 

Having said all this, would I have even played the game without the link to the From Software legacy? It’s a frustratingly complex idea to discuss and think about as I predominantly played this game looking for that Dark Souls feel and I think overall I did get it.