Salt and Sacrifice Reviews
Salt and Sacrifice is enjoyable in short bursts. It retains certain core concepts from the original, including a fairly controversial one: the lack of a map. This is further compounded by repetitive Mage Hunts that become tedious after a while.
Overall, Salt and Sacrifice still nails the core elements that make a 2D reimagining of Dark Souls a compelling idea thanks to its fundamental understanding of how character and level progression should flow and its expansive combat system. By adding in an extra layer of Metroidvania-style exploration and a unique approach to boss encounters with its Mage Hunt mechanic, Salt and Sacrifice sees Ska Studios carve out a space for itself as more than the studio that is good at making 2D Dark Souls games.
Salt and Sacrifice is like Salt and Sanctuary, just less ugly – at the same time, it's definitely more than just '2-D Dark Souls.' Indeed, this game blends the Souls, Hollow Knight and Monster Hunter in nearly perfect proportions.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Salt and Sacrifice doesn't innovate as much as it could have done, but is an interesting entry in the 2D soulslike niche.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Salt and Sanctuary checks all the boxes for what a 2D Soulslike should have but doesn't do much beyond that, delivering a worthy, albeit conventional addition to the sub-genre.
Salt and Sacrifice has a lot going for it, but some bad design choices hold it back. I’d recommend watching some gameplay footage – especially of its bosses – before buying.
Salt and Sacrifice is a bad combination of Souls like, Metroidvania and Monster Hunter, making it feel chaotic.
Review in Chinese | Read full review
Rough, sometimes intriguing, sometimes frustrating: Salt and Sacrifice does its job, but it doesn't always go smoothly. The Mage hunting sequences are clever, but the pieces of the puzzle sometimes simply don't fit together.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Salt and Sacrifice is a riff on what came before, but not an entirely successful one. A tense, fraught combat system with gallons of customisation options carries Ska Studios’ sequel, and boss fights are entertaining if overly tough at times, but the storytelling and narrative designs of Salt and Sanctuary can’t hold up their end of the bargain.
Salt and Sacrifice imbues its Souls-like formula with elements from Monster Hunter, creating a peculiar mixture that falls just short of realizing its full potential.
Salt & Sacrifice is a very challenging game and that may put off a lot of people. But these games are made with a very specific audience in mind. For fan, the sequel is a bigger and better version of the first game with a satisfying kill-die-repeat gameplay loop. It doesn’t make any compromises in quality and that is quite evident from the look of the game to how it play. If you’re someone who’s not put off by the challenge (that’s sometimes needless) and “immersive” Souls features, definitely give Salt & Sacrifice a try. It’s definitely worth one’s salt….hahaha…I’ll see myself out.
So does Salt and Sacrifice succeed in being an enjoyable experience? Absolutely, it does. The controls are responsive, there are many viable styles of play, the music is engaging, the sound effects are crunchy, and the animations are fun and stylized.
I want to like Salt and Sacrifice, and in some stretches, I do. I enjoyed exploring the world, concepts of hunting and crafting, and the moody atmosphere, which kept me continuing for dozens of hours. But its clunky progression systems and many maddening enemy encounters quickly make the fun times easy to forget.
While the opening can be off-putting, Salt and Sacrifice is a huge game that picks up almost instantly once you're past the beginning, with multiple large areas that will each take a good amount of hours to explore and track down all the Mages that roam there.
After thoroughly enjoying the greatness that is Salt and Sanctuary, Salt and Sacrifice is a somewhat disappointing experience. It's still a good game, though, and one that you'll be compelled to play until it starts to overstay its welcome about 10 hours in.
Even though Salt and Sacrifice is a good game, many adjustments have been made that take away from the game's unique character while favoring more formulaic gameplay. It's a game that, in general, is enjoyable and entertaining, but its accomplishments are weighed down by several innovations that stay instead of contributing, giving the feeling that it has gone a step backward.
Every death feels fair, and the design philosophy is fine-tuned in such a way that feels intentional and deliberate. Salt and Sacrifice, on the other hand, achieves difficulty with clunky design, which completely misses the point of what makes a good challenge worth the time. Instead, the sacrifice of wasted time here is more than enough to make you salty.
Salt and Sacrifice to Salt and Sanctuary is like Dark Souls 2 to Dark Souls 1. It diverges a lot from the original, with some ideas that work well and some that don't. All in all, it's still an excellent 2-D Souls-like Metroidvania that brilliantly infuses Monster Hunter elements with challenging combat. Despite some poor design choices and questionable difficulty spikes, it's still astonishing to think this game was created by a team of just two people.
Salt And Sacrifice is every bit the sequel I could have wanted for Salt And Sanctuary. Everything about the gameplay has been elevated a polished better than any previous title from Ska Studios. With excellent combat, and a flexible progression system that lets you alter your build and playstyle how you like, mixed with amazing art, creature design, and atmosphere, this is the latest must-buy indie title.