GAME REVIEW: Salt and Sacrifice
Ahh, Salt and Sacrifice. We’ve been waiting for you for so long! If you aren’t familiar with this game, this is the long-awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed Metroidvania/Souls game, Salt and Sanctuary. The original S&S was easily one of our favorite games of 2016 and a fantastic opportunity for myself and my partner to do some gaming together (we always struggle to find 2-player games that we both like). He was the one who taught me how to play Dark Souls, so naturally, we had to play the 2-player Souls-game together. Well, when Salt and Sacrifice was released in 2022, we immediately hopped onto the PSN so we could start playing together. But… how did it hold up?
The short answer is: not well. But let’s dive into it.
The game opens with a simple intro, following suit with the previous game, where you are pitted against a hefty boss that you’re not expected to defeat. The artwork and design was immediately wonderful and familiar, so things were heading into a good direction right away, though there is an argument to be made that they just did the same thing as before and didn’t add anything new or exciting to it.
However, the first real disappointment was in finding out that the game isn’t really a proper Metroidvania the way the first one was. Much like Dark Souls 2, the game abandoned the interconnected world design (arguably one of the best parts of the game), in order to have a central hub from whence you can travel to different areas. Boooooooooo. We tend to consider this lazy design, especially if you’re doing a sequel for a game that had a truly wonderful, nuanced, and well-though-out map.
Speaking of lazy design, we also noted that a few of the enemies in this game were either direct copies of bad guys from the first game, or were mildly changed but with essentially the same skins. We saw The Alchemist boss as a regular enemy, and many of the bad guys from the Red Hall of Cages were present again as minions of the butcher-like boss. Again, one could argue that it’s a nice throwback, but when there are other lazy aspects to the game design, having a couple of random copy-paste characters doesn’t feel like a throwback but rather a “we ran out of ideas so let’s just use what we had in the last game.”
Story-wise, the game isn’t terrible, suggesting that the Inquisitors (Mage-hunters, like the PC), might not be the good guys and that perhaps the Mages understood something that the others don’t. However, even the story ambiguity seems like less effort was put into it than before, and is less interesting. Salt and Sanctuary is about winding up on a strange island that hosts horrible parts of other worlds that other NPCs remember. There’s mystique and you feel as though you understand more and more after each playthrough, whereas in Salt and Sacrifice is about already being dead, but sent to the world to hunt Mages as an act of penance for doing something bad in real life. The game boasts itself to be Souls-like, Monster Hunter-like, and Metroidvania, but of those, the only one that seems really true in this second iteration is the grinding of monsters in order to get better weapons and armor, to defeat bigger and stronger monsters… aka a Monster Hunter-like game. The high-level challenge of the boss fights that should be Souls-like is completely ruined by the clusterfuck melees in which there are two or three bosses all fighting one another, and the lack of interconnected world maps ultimately stops it from being a true Metroidvania.
Most of the NPCs that you bring back to your hub are only useful if you want to do online PVP, which frankly feels like a cop-out, as the game seems like it wants to push online PVP despite that not being remotely close to the reason why we want to play it. In fact, our main reason was that the original S&S was perhaps the best 2-player game we’ve played together and the only Souls-like game to offer a proper couch co-op. Now, playing with two players had weird controls (some of which were updated as the makers had time to fix problems) and the single screen became unreasonably tough at times when falling into boss arenas with more than one boss. So they’ve replaced the proper covenants that give you bonuses or advantages/disadvantages in gameplay, and replaced them with online PvP… truly so disappointing.
Now, let’s talk about the mechanics in a little more detail. Salt and Sacrifice is, straight-up as mentioned, not a Souls-game. Souls-games are defined by their critical difficulty and the need for players to customize armor, weapons, and even fighting styles in order to defeat hard, relentless bosses. This game is nothing like that, as the Mages (aka bosses) spawn, once the first is defeated, all over the place, and sometimes as many as three Mages will appear at the same time and then fight each other. The premise of the game is that you are a Mage-hunter who proceeds through five different arenas, finding Mages who pool in places to fight each other, while you are just dodging and surviving until one of them gets killed and you can step in to fight the other(s) left behind. In short: the game is an absolute grind that hardly requires any mechanical skill beyond an inhuman ability to dodge.
The level design also involves a great deal of climbing upwards with no rails, while many enemies have obscene knockback in their hits, so even playing a character in heavy armor, I get flung from extremely high up to my death with annoying regularity. The pacing of the game feels slow, especially without the ability to teleport between obelisks (spawn/save points) within the arenas, making returning to where you were both a slog and annoying, because the arenas are so big and hard to memorize without simply failing a shitload of times. The upgrade runes were okay, but even there, it seemed as though the controls were a little slow, with PC actions not happening right after the input was received from the controller.
If you enjoy grind-for-gear games, where you fight big, scary monsters to get crafting materials for armor and weapons, that will help you fight bigger and scarier monsters, you will surely enjoy Salt and Sacrifice. However, if you were impatiently awaiting a sequel to Salt and Sanctuary, I am devastated to announce that this game in no way lives up to its predecessor. It’s not a terrible game to play for a while, but the slogging pace, limp lore, repetitive arenas, and boss spam ultimately make it a bit of a miss for those of us looking for a Souls/Metroidvania game worth playing with your partner.
