Salt and Sanctuary
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Salt and Sanctuary Media
Critic Reviews for Salt and Sanctuary
Salt and Sanctuary is a derivative Dark Souls clone - but it's a shockingly good one.
Ska Studios' Salt and Sanctuary is obvious about trying to emulate Dark Souls, but offers enough deep gameplay and beautiful aesthetic to stand tall on its own.
You could call Salt and Sanctuary a 2D mashup of Dark Souls and Castlevania, and you'd be right. But such a simple pronouncement would be a disservice to the tremendous amount of thought that's gone into Salt and Sanctuary, whether it's in the graphic style that evokes horror through the style of comic strips or in the intricate web of dungeons and castles serves as it map.
Mashing together the challenge of Dark Souls with the platforming and combat styling of Castlevania makes for a challenging but highly rewarding formula
This combat-intensive adventure manages to be more than the sum of its Dark Souls-influenced parts.
All told, Salt and Sanctuary is just about what you'd expect it to be: it's more or less a 2D Dark Souls, but with a little more emphasis on less. Salt and Sanctuary does an admirable job of hitting all the right beats that it needs to provide a challenging and fun action adventure that will no doubt provide a solid bang for your buck, but it doesn't do a whole lot to stand on its own two legs; this is a game that can only thrive on the scraps generated by the overwhelming popularity of a much better game series. We'd give this one a recommendation to any Dark Souls fans - this is a decent way of capturing that game's spirit - but those who've never been interested won't find much new here to entice them.
A fantastic, original take on the Souls-formula that maintains the addictive risk/reward loop we've come to expect from the genre.
