Salt and Sanctuary’s most innovative system is probably creeds, Salt and Sanctuary’s analog to Dark Soul’s covenants. In Dark Souls each covenant had a unique mechanism for advancing, and were mostly multiplayer focused. Salt and Sanctuary is essentially a single-player game so the creeds are much more homogenized, but the system as a whole has some interesting ideas.
Checkpoints in Salt and Sanctuary are called sanctuaries (hence the name), and can only be used when claimed by a creed. Each creed begins with one sanctuary claimed, and the rest will be claimed by your current creed whenever you find one. Each sanctuary starts empty, and can be filled with up to 4 NPC merchants of your choice. Each merchant type for each creed offers different types of wares, so your creed essentially determines the items available for purchase. (You can switch creeds, so it’s not locked in for your entire run or anything, but switching is a bit of a headache so you do probably want to just stick with whichever creed best complements your build and playstyle.)
The idea of customizing your sanctuaries is interesting, but is probably where the game trips over itself for the hardest (which ultimately may have been for the best). Like I said, you can only have 4 NPCs in each sanctuary, but the issue is the Guide, who causes it all to come crashing down. The Guide does two things: he lets you travel to any other sanctuary, and sells calling horns, which lets you teleport to any sanctuary with a Guide. So you don’t need to actually make any trade-offs when deciding which NPCs to put in a sanctuary since the Guide network essentially lets you access any NPC from any sanctuary. The limit on calling horns only allowing you to travel to sanctuaries with Guide is also odd, since after traveling with a sanctuary with Guide you can then use the Guide to travel to any other sanctuary; it adds an extra step to using calling horns frequently enough that it feels like they should’ve let you just teleport to any sanctuary. Of course, while the choices here feel odd, the alternatives would likely be a less robust—and thus more tedious—travel system, so I suppose I can’t complain too much.
Back to creeds, it’s the provision system that makes the creeds so interesting to me. Whenever you rest at a sanctuary, that creed will give you provisions—which function as your estus flask. But it isn’t “just” an estus flask, since each creed has a different healing item, which becomes another element to take into consideration to decide your creed. (For instance, one creed’s healing item heals you for a medium amount immediately, while another heals for a larger amount over time.) Each time you advance in rank in the creed, you choose a new item to add to your provisions. Usually you are going to want another healing item (equivalent to expanding your estus flask), but the ability to get an infinite supply of other consumables is really neat. And, naturally, each creed offers a different set of potential provisions. For instance, one option In my creed was a consumable that temporarily added extra lightning damage to my weapon (like gold pine resin in Dark Souls). I’m sure everyone who has played Dark Souls or Bloodborne knows how useful those items are… but I never used them since I had a limited amount, and wanted to make sure I had enough in case I ever hit a battle I really needed them for. But in Salt and Sanctuary I had one that would be refreshed each time I rested at a sanctuary, so there was never any hesitation to use it.
While each covenant in Dark Souls had a unique way of advancing, each creed in Salt and Sanctuary advances by giving them certain monster parts. Each creed asks for different parts, so at least there’s that, although farming for the required parts can get tedious if they take a while to drop. Switching creeds resets your advancement (and also sometimes bugs out a bit), so that’s another reason to stick with one creed to the extent you can.
Stat points and equipment requirements are probably where Salt and Sanctuary deviates from Dark Souls the most. Salt and Sanctuary’s attributes are simpler and more straightforward than Dark Souls’ (there are only six!), but rather than getting to freely increase attributes, you instead advance along a massive skill tree, a la Path of Exile. Like Path of Exile, every character has access to the exact same skill tree, with the difference being that each class starts in a different spot. (However, the starting spots are only a couple of nodes away from each other, so overcoming the initial differences is actually incredibly easy if you want to do so.) Each node gives a point in an attribute, but a few also increase proficiency with equipment, which is required to use them. Rather than having stat requirements like Dark Souls, each piece of equipment has a rank, and equipping an equipment type of a certain rank above 0 requires proficiency in that rank of equipment. So equipping rank 2 swords requires rank 2 sword proficiency, equipping rank 3 bows requires rank 3 bow proficiency, and so on. (You also need to unlock equipment proficiency in order, so you can’t get cute with an unorthodox path along the skill tree.)
The result is that your build is largely determined for you. You decide which type(s) of weapon you want to use, what class of armor you want to wear, and whether you want a shield, and then just go down the applicable branches in the skill tree. To be honest, this is probably the clunkiest system in Salt and Sanctuary. The issue is that you advance in skill trees much faster than you can find stronger weapons, especially for the less common weapon types. I unlocked rank 5 proficiency in my weapon before I found a rank 2 weapon of the type I used, which made the proficiency system feel like it was simply locking me into one weapon type rather than making sure I wasn’t using weapons that were too strong too soon. While the skill tree provides choice, it’s less freedom than direct point allocation, which I actually don’t think is a huge loss, but is still technically a loss. I found it was a relatively clever way to steer players towards competent builds without imposing massive game knowledge requirements on them—following the proficiency nodes for a weapon type will provide a decent stat allocation for that weapon type. Simple and easy!
The weapon upgrade system is, unsurprisingly, relatively similar to Dark Souls. You can upgrade your weapon (up to +7) with salt and different types of upgrade materials, with different weapons requiring different kinds of materials. What differs is the ability to transmute equipment, which is how you get boss and enemy equipment. Transmutation requires an alchemical material (which determines the resulting item), and an item of the same type as the equipment you’re creating. Transmutation decreases the item’s level by 1—meaning it can actually be used to substitute upgrade materials (by upgrading using the materials required by the initial item rather than the transmuted item).
There is no infusion system in Salt and Sanctuary, so the only upgrades are the simple linear power-ups. However, Salt and Sanctuary has an inventory slot for a charm you can attach to your weapon, which I felt fulfilled a similar role. Charms can add extra damage of a certain type (like infusing), but also additional effects, such as extending the reach of your weapon or healing you on hit. They don’t seem like a huge addition, but I felt that they added a lot of extra depth and customization options. You can also set up two different weapon load-outs that you can quickly swap between, except holding a weapon one- verses two-handed counts as a separate load-out.
Otherwise… it’s 2D Dark Souls. You have a stamina-based combat system with no animation cancelling, dodge-rolling that is affected by your equip load, minimal story but tons of lore suggested through in-game descriptions, and so on.
A unique mechanic that Salt and Sanctuary introduces is “wounds,” which shaves off a bit of your maximum health each time you take a non-minimal amount of damage (until the next time you return to a sanctuary). It wasn’t a huge deal, but overall I didn’t like it. Generally, it either didn’t matter or it was extremely annoying. I think the intent was to put a cap at your effective health between checkpoints, but your healing items are limited anyway, so it felt unnecessary.
Since it’s 2D, Salt and Sanctuary also incorporates a platforming element not found in Dark Souls. Thankfully, it generally just added an extra dimension to exploration; there are only a few spots in the game that require precise (read as: frustrating) platforming. Enemies and bosses are also a bit simpler than in Dark Souls, but because they’re 2D they can be harder to approach since you can’t go around the “side.” So combat is about timing and distance, like Dark Souls, but in a different flavor.
The map, like Dark Souls, is also sprawling, diverse, and interconnected. I actually found the map incredibly impressive, since it manages to achieve this while remaining within the bounds of 2D topology (that is, without teleports or layers). The various locales in the game are varied and beautiful. The character and monster sprites… are not as nice. So I don’t think the unit sprites are worse in quality than the backgrounds, but they have a completely different, much more cartoony style, which doesn’t fit the dark fantasy atmosphere. You get used to it and stop paying attention to it relatively soon, so it’s really just a minor quibble, but it still would’ve been nice if the artistic style was a bit more cohesive. (Like Blasphemous, another 2D Souls-like metroidvania with impeccable style.)
There is passive multiplayer much in the same style as Dark Souls. You can leave messages by selecting words from a predetermined word bank, and see specters of other players’ final moments. There are a few other ways that information from other players is integrated into your game, I’ll let you find them yourself. There is also active multiplayer, but you can only directly invite people and then you can only PVP by using an item, so there are no unwanted “invasions,” which is something I was thankful for.
I didn’t play a magic character so I’m not too familiar with it, but Salt and Sanctuary has a balance mechanic for spells. Each spell is attuned to either fire and lightning, and you need to alternate between “fire” and “lightning” spells to maintain balance, or else bad things will happen to you. (Like I said, didn’t play a magic user, so don’t know what… although I think it’s a bunch of damage.) I think this is a really neat idea to force magic builds to think about and intentionally use their spells, rather than just spamming the same spell over and over again (which is admittedly what generally happened in my magic playthrough of Dark Souls).
Story is presented much the same way as in Dark Souls. That is to say, there isn’t so much story as there is lore. You start off in a boat transporting a princess to a foreign country, a giant sea monster attacks it, you get thrown overboard and wash up on a mysterious island. There are a few NPCs with “quests” that primarily involve running into them a few times over the course of the game, but there is flavor text all over the game hinting towards people, places and events in the game’s backstory. Each item description has some lore, but so does every single node in the skill tree, which is honestly an impressive amount of writing. (A lot of nodes in the skill tree are the same generic stat boosts, but each node has a unique snippet of flavor text.)
Dark Souls is great, and despite the proliferation of the Souls-like genre, games that rise to the level of quality of the originals (and keep the same sub-genre/aesthetic) are relatively rare. Salt and Sanctuary manages to achieve that in a smaller package and with its own unique twists and ideas. If you’re in the mood for some Dark Souls but already exhausted FromSoftware’s catalogue, Salt and Sanctuary is a great supplement.
(One minor tip: At the very beginning of the game, you fight a boss that you only get one chance against. If you think you can do it, I recommend restarting until you beat them. You’ll receive an item that won’t do much immediately, but will be immensely valuable lategame.)
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