Salt and Sacrifice Video Game Review (About In Description)
0Magester Hunter
I really wanted to love Salt and Sacrifice, and for a little while, I did. As the sequel to one of my favorite soulslikes, Salt and Sanctuary, it hit all of the buttons I had hoped it would: challenging combat, a huge variety of grotesque and intimidating enemies, fun boss fights, and an expansive world to explore. But there’s a monster-sized twist to Salt and Sacrifice’s gameplay formula: It introduces Monster Hunter-like elements, complete with repeatable boss hunts, roaming area bosses, and exhausting chases of your targets through gigantic zones. It’s a risky experiment, and one that doesn’t quite pay off.
Right out of the gate, Salt and Sacrifice doesn’t initially seem all that different from its 2016 predecessor. It still has that signature gloomy and grim Ska Studios flavor, though all of the hand-drawn art and animations have been completely redone for the better; the tutorial borrows heavily from the Dark Souls school of teaching you the bare minimum, then crushing your spirit with a tutorial boss that’s technically possible to beat, but you’re not really supposed to; and combat maintains a very quick pace despite being tied to a fairly strict stamina meter that highly discourages button mashing.
These bits that Salt and Sacrifice inherits from Salt and Sanctuary are its strongest points. There’s a ton of playstyle customization thanks to a wide variety of different weapons types; combat is deep, satisfying, and impactful; the zones are fun to explore with meaningful rewards tucked away in hard-to-reach areas; there’s a refreshingly easy to initiate co-op mode; and several options for PVP as well.
The bits that Salt and Sacrifice inherits from Salt and Sanctuary are its strongest points.
But the two games are actually very different on a fundamental level. Instead of having one continuous map, Salt and Sacrifice is actually split up into five zones, each of which are enormous and sprawl out in every direction, with progression through them primarily gated by doors that only open when you devour a certain amount of named Mage hearts. You do this by initiating Mage Hunts, which are Monster Hunter-esque boss fights that have you chasing down a particular Mage all throughout the map, engaging it in several small skirmishes until it eventually settles into its proper boss arena, at which point you’re locked into a traditional boss fight.
It all looks fine on paper, but in practice, this blending of Monster Hunter, Metroidvania, and Soulslike is a far from perfect mix. For one, you’re never given a map. Just to reiterate, these zones are huge, often with entire sublevels that take place above ground, underground, in large castles, and in the skies. Trying to chart a path back to the boss you were fighting, the salt resource you dropped after dying, or the locked door that you’re now able to open is far more frustrating than it needs to be. Sure, Salt and Sanctuary didn’t have a map either (I also wish it did), but its absence matters less in that game because its levels are much more linear in their design.
To add on to that, while there are plenty of checkpoints in the form of obelisks that act as respawn and restock stations, there’s no way to fast travel between them or even choose which one you want to start at when you first go from the main hub to a zone, which amounts to lots of retracing your steps through the same enemies, the same traps, the same platforming challenges over and over again, which gets very repetitive.
Then there are the mage hunts themselves, which come with their own set of drawbacks. The final phases when you actually fight the boss in their walled-off arena are generally pretty fun. They can feel overwhelming when you first encounter them – but after a few attempts, you start to see the openings for you to dodge, block, or attack, making them regularly land in that sweet spot of being difficult but manageable.
It’s the chases that are the problem. The big issue is that you never know what else is going to be there when a Mage decides to teleport to an area. I often found myself having to contend with two Mages at once, or a Mage that just camped a ledge and made it nearly impossible for me to get to where I needed to go, or a mage that would spawn extremely tough and durable enemies in an area that was already full of extremely tough and durable enemies. Mercifully, damage persists on Mages while you’re chasing them so you don’t go back to square one when you die, but the bummer is that you have a limited amount of restorative items. On a few occasions I found myself spending 20 to 30 minutes chasing a Mage around the map, exhausting my resources to the point where I only had a few attempts before I completely drained myself of healing flasks by the time I reached the actual boss fight. I would have to quit out of the hunt, farm more flasks, and then do the whole thing over again.