Analysis of Salt and Sacrifice

When Ska Studios released its sleeper hit Salt and Sanctuary in 2016, the small indie team made it abundantly clear that they understood the fundamentals in an immersive Soul-like experience featuring all the genre staples that fans crave. hardcore action RPG fans. With Salt and Sacrifice, Ska Studios returns with the help of Devoured Studios to deliver another great 2D reimagining of Dark Souls, this time with a deeper focus on world exploration and a Monster Hunter-like approach to boss fight At first, Salt and Sacrifice will sound familiar to any fan of Souls-like games, as players are killed within minutes of creating a new character and choosing a starting class. The Marked Inquisitor is not living or dead but is a reanimated soul that finds himself routinely dying and spawning in a once peaceful world that is now in chaos. Only by using Guiltless Shards, obtained through boss battles, and collecting Salt from slain enemies, which is used as the game’s leveling currency, can the Inquisitor become powerful enough to repair the tedious Altarstone Kingdom of Salt and Sacrifice. It’s a very familiar storyline and set of mechanics for anyone who’s spent time with FromSoftware games. However, the similarity does not end there. Common Souls mechanics like the Estus Flask, now named the Hearthen Flask, and bonfires, now called the Obelisk, play healing and relaxation roles for players tackling the brutal world of Salt and Sacrifice. The game also features a central hub area where players can increase their attributes along a branching skill tree and access a teleporter to reach new zones, similar to 2015’s Bloodborne. The Multiplayer component is new for Salt and Sacrifice, offering players the opportunity to enlist help in facing the game’s many bosses or to engage in PvP action. Similar to Covenants in Dark Souls, players have the opportunity to join different factions such as the PvE-focused Blueheart Runners or the PvP-focused Shroud Alliance. While overlooked and unimportant to the main story of Salt and Sacrifice, the factions add a neat gameplay element to the game and extend replayability across multiple save files. Visually, Salt and Sacrifice still retains much of the flash game-inspired art style but with new player and enemy character models. Where previously Salt and Sanctuary presented a very foreboding and foreboding atmosphere, painted in muted colors and dark environments, Salt and Sacrifice injects a new layer of color into its settings. Each zone pops out with more vigor than before, and the cartoon-inspired visual style benefits from this while still effectively bringing the world to the brink of collapse. Salt and Sacrifice’s most notable deviation from Souls-like inspirations comes from its 2D nature, which takes the vast and intricate level design of FromSoftware’s titles and translates it into a sidescrolling adventure. The result is a compelling series of levels from ruined towns, underground crypts, and snowy mountaintops that expand vertically and horizontally with crypts and dungeons. Salt and Sacrifice takes concepts that the Souls games often exploit, like the rigid platforming and booby traps of Sen’s Fortress, and expands them as the basic challenge of traveling the world, occasionally to a fault. . While the classic platforming feel of Salt and Sacrifice is mostly fun and keeps players on their toes, it does feel dated in some respects. From a design standpoint, Salt and Sacrifice still feels like it’s working within the playbook of the first iteration of Souls-like games. In a post-Elden Ring world where Souls-likes are starting to rely more on interesting bosses and mastery of combat mechanics as the driving force for a challenge, Salt and Sacrifice relies on the use of booby traps and surprise attacks to drain the player’s health . Frustratingly, Ska Studios makes many of these traps too subtle, often compounding the scene so that with repeated deaths and backtracking through the game’s levels players will surely know where each trap For experienced Souls-like players, these design principles may seem like a core part of the Souls-like experience. However, to newcomers fresh out of the Elden Ring or Tunic, it can add a layer of frustration or even feel “cheap” as Salt and Sacrifice still dogmatically adheres to the original Dark style level design Souls. RELATED: Soul-Like Games to Play After You Have Elden Ring Combat in Salt and Sacrifice also deviates from the typical bumper button-based inputs of many Soul-likes, moving to a combo-oriented system using faces button. Each weapon in the game has its own unique combo that requires players to alternate between light and heavy attacks to potentially stun an opponent while their poise is broken or even i -upcut them in the air. No two classes play alike in Salt and Sacrifice, offering plenty of replayability for players embarking on multiple playthroughs. Additionally, the game’s relatively forgiving skill tree, which features multiple opportunities to hone, all equal Salt and Sacrifice as a versatile game in terms of crafting. Players will spend hours backtracking through Salt and Sacrifice’s five main regions due to Ska Studios leaning towards Metroidvania-style platformer mechanics compared to its more linear predecessor. Various Inquisitor tools are scattered throughout the world, unlocking new traversal mechanics that will create seemingly mundane parts of the landscape once the player discovers how to interact with them appropriately. Going back and exploring old places with new tools is always a rewarding adventure, as Salt and Sacrifice rewards exploration with lots of loot and, most importantly, more boss fights. Among the game’s various minor bosses that dot each region are the pivotal Mage Hunts: lengthy excursions in which the Spellmarked Inquisitor follows the paths of Mages wreaking havoc, eventually leading to a boss battle and ends with the Inquistor devouring their hearts. These Mage Hunts are very important to the player, as hearts open new doors and the Mage Trail leaves high-level enemies carrying critical crafting materials. Each Mage uniquely wields a themed power such as fire, earth, wind, or even fungus. However, despite the many variations in elemental powers, art styles, and minions for each Mage, these outings towards the end of Salt and Sacrifice are pretty monotonous. Past the initial jitters of challenging a new boss, players will find that most bosses use the same three types of attacks: an AOE attack, a homing missile barrage, and a standard physical that strike, all of which are clearly telegraphed and capable of evasion. More than anything else, Salt and Sacrifice becomes an exercise in stamina management and zoning when it comes to most Mages compared to boss fights in other Souls-likes, where the 3D plane allows for more complex movesets and higher which is the skill ceiling for combat. That’s not to say that the bosses in Salt and Sacrifice are fun work. Fights can become frantic when bosses unleash a rapid series of AOE attacks and homing missiles within the game’s claustrophobic arena, often forcing players into seemingly impossible situations. Although, after a certain point with a high level and focused build, these Mage fights start to mix mechanically. Additionally, Salt and Sacrifice’s hitboxes aren’t well defined, and attacks tend to hit a good deal past perceived failure points. Hitbox’s problems are exacerbated when the game’s low frame rate cartoon aesthetic comes into play, creating a layer of challenge that occasionally feels independent of the player’s skill level. Even the most patient Souls fan can find themselves gnashing their teeth when an enemy attack lands in an area where they thought they were safe and then gets thrown off the screen or, worse, on a cliff. However, despite Salt and Sacrifice’s shortcomings of repetitive boss fights, less-than-refined hitboxes, and some dated world design elements, it’s still an entertaining game to play. Even though its main gameplay loop starts to feel repetitive towards the end, the game doesn’t overstay its welcome and only ends when it needs to. Overall, Salt and Sacrifice still nails the key elements that make a 2D reimagining of Dark Souls a compelling idea thanks to its basic understanding of how character and level development should flow and the vast this battle system. By adding an extra layer of Metroidvania-style exploration and a unique approach to boss encounters to its Mage Hunt mechanic, Salt and Sacrifice sees Ska Studios make a space for itself as more than just a studio that excels on making 2D Dark Souls games. Salt and Sacrifice releases May 10 for PC, PS4, and PS5. Today Technology has been provided the PC code for the purposes of this review. MORE: 9 Souls-Like Games That Are More Bloody Than Dark Souls