3/5 ★ – Shidan's review of Salt and Sanctuary.

After 5 years, I've played it for the second time. First, I want to be clear, even though I’m going to talk about the bad things, Salt and Sanctuary is not a bad game. This game is heavily inspired by Dark Souls, but unlike that game, here many mechanics and elements of the design are incoherent. Most of the time it is either uninteresting or frustrating. You’re going to die a lot, and not even in combat, but because of the bad design. For example, there's a mechanic of long jump, you have to press 2 buttons at the same time in order to do it (and if you want to get further, you also have to press left or right), and usually there’s a cliff in the places you need to perform this jump, and since you lose 10% of your money every time you die, you'll end up broke until you get the jump (Yes, later you get a dash, but the jump still isn't well designed) Another example, there's a skill you learn, where you can make cloud platforms solid by using your torch, well... There's a checkpoint just after three breakable platforms, and below those is a long cloud platform. What happened is, I go to the checkpoint with the torch on my hand, I make the platforms fall to get to the checkpoint, after resting I got out again, but I fall. Neither the breakable platforms or the cloud platform stopped my fall. Why? Because when you rest you hide the torch, so when I went out the cloud platform was not solid, but also resting doesn't make the breakable platforms appear again instantly, so the breakable platforms weren't rebuilt and I died, and this alone is not that bad, the problem is that the game is full of this situations. Also, I found a ladder once, I assumed that if I jump, I could climb it, but when I jumped I went through the ladder and fell, because... the ladder is not extended all the way (visually it was the same size as some small ladders), and that's the problem of Salt and Sanctuary, many times you don't know if it was your fault or not. Even though I've mentioned these bad designed aspects, I haven't even talked about the worst part yet, and they're the bosses, their move-sets are so simple (two melee attacks, one range attack and one jump attack) and they either get frustrating (Muriella Mal, The Witch of the Lake) or way too easy (almost all of them), but they're not memorable or unique (the visual design is fine, but everything else about them is not), the last boss (The Nameless God) was actually pretty good, but I wasn't enjoy the game that much at that point. The combat is fine, and small details were very good, the world has potential and it could have been a great game, for example, the endings are very well done. But sadly this game is not that enjoyable, it could and should have been better. Maybe I could have recommended it years ago, but right now there many better Action RPGs and Metroidvanias that deserve your atention. Note: -I was hoping Salt and Sacrifice to be better, but everything I heard about it isn't good, so I think this is the end of my time with Salt and Sanctuary.