My Gamer has reviewed Salt and Sanctuary:

Full Review

There are many things that make a video game great including gameplay, narrative, characters, camera, challenge, detail and so many more. One that often goes unappreciated is style, but it couldn’t be any more important. Style is what grabs your eye and tells you that this game is different, this game is fun, this game is new. It’s hard to develop your own way of presenting older ideas, to make it stand out from everyone else. There’s always a generic hero, but what makes him different from the other 1,000,000 other heroes in their own games? The usual answer is not much, so many build on top of others and try to put their own spin on it, and such is the case here.

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Ska Studios definitely pays respect to those who came before, but didn’t just stop there, and put their own style on what was already a winning formula.  While having some downsides, there are plenty of great things to see and play, and with so many play styles, classes, items, and weapons there is a real bang for your buck here as you can just play it again and again and get something different each time. If you don’t want to break the bank, but you want that Dark Souls feel, then this is something you really shouldn’t miss.

Score: 8.5/10

Salt and Sanctuary tries to emulate Dark Souls and falls flat, according to RPS's Alec Meer.

Everything I love about Dark Souls is everything that makes me want to scream in Salt and Sanctuary [official site].

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, but there’s no escaping that 2D stab ‘em up Salt & Sanctuary is designed to be one thing and one thing only: an indie Dark Souls. And by ‘indie’ I just don’t mean whatever the hell that even means from a development perspective any more, but rather stylistic go-tos such as platforming, side-scrolling and big-eyed characters. This is pressed, like so much Playdough mashed into a child’s dinner, on top of Dark Souls inspirations which run all the way from Souls – sorry, Salt – collection which is lost upon death to one handed/two handed weapon switching to even suspiciously similar fonts.

Sometimes it goes too far in emulating its icon – overwrought names such as The Sodden Knight and The Festering Banquet lack a certain delicacy – but rarely does the game ever embrace the humour which might be required to make its silly names and tousle-haired moppet characters work.

I’m showing my hand too soon, I admit. I found Salt & Sanctuary consistently irritating even though I could not in good conscience call it bad, to the extent that I struggle to be level-headed when describing even basic aspects. I didn’t finish it, because I bounced off it in irritation. It’s one of those cases where I can’t entirely identify why, but boils down to that I was not enjoying myself, even though I had expected to.

More.

The 2D Action RPG Salt and Santuary has been released today:

Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D action role-playing video game developed by Ska Studios.

A doomed sailor is shipwrecked on an uncharted island. In fog-shrouded valleys, where grinning, mossy corpses cling to rusted arms, shambling figures begin to stir. Beneath crumbling, salt-worn structures, labyrinthine passageways lead to unspeakable evil, long forgotten by man.

Salt and Sanctuary seamlessly combines fast, brutal, and complex 2D combat with richly developed RPG mechanics. Discover, craft, and upgrade over 600 weapons, armor pieces, spells, and items as you explore a cursed realm of forgotten cities, blood-soaked dungeons, desecrated monuments, and the fallen lords they once celebrated.

From Ska Studios, the award-winning indie studio behind a long list of stylistic, visceral, and brutally executed action titles that includes The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, and Charlie Murder, comes Salt and Sanctuary, the studio’s most ambitious title to date.

Kyle MacGregor (theEscapist) has reviewed the PS4 version of the 2D-RPG Salt and Sanctuary. The game is coming later to PS Vita and PC:

Salt and Sanctuary Review - Soulsvania

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Whether it's zombies, a hulking dragon, or the terrain itself, just about everything in the world of Salt & Sanctuary threatens the player's continued existence. Moreover, nothing tells you where to go, what to do, or how to do it. The developer, Ska Studios, invites us to explore and learn from our failures. It encourages us to take note of its intricacies: how enemies move, when they strike, what booby traps and other surprises lay in wait, at the ready to kill or maim us.

This process will eventually lead players to move from one sanctuary to the next, braving hordes of bloodthirsty creatures that dwell in forests, towers, caverns, and dungeons which stretch between places of respite. This difficult road is also punctuated by powerful foes and mighty bosses who are the gatekeepers to your progress. I often found myself crashing against them like waves beating a cliffside, slowly making progress by eroding the challenge before me. Sometimes I would need to become stronger, or rethink my strategy. Other times, I would need to become painfully intimate with my surroundings and fight with near-perfect execution.

This can be arduous, but the frustrations always seem to melt away when failure, at long last, gives way to success. The elation that comes from overcoming a boundary is proportional to how difficult it was to best. It's something that creates a feedback loop, impelling us to charge headlong into the next crucible, so we can be beat down and built up all over again.

That dysfunctional relationship is something fans of From Software's work know well by this point, and Ska Studios has mimicked the formula beautifully. It lives up to its billing as a blend of Castlevania and Dark Souls, presenting players with a complex web of environments that make wonderful use of verticality, interlocking and looping in on one another in fascinating ways.

 

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Score: 4/5

Eye found a new trailer for the 2d-Action RPG Salt and Sanctuary:

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Shipwrecked on a mysterious island, a faceless sailor must fight to survive.