Salt And Sacrifice manages to overcome a lousy first impression

Ska Studios' Salt And Sanctuary sequel is a bit ugly and off-putting on first glance, but there's an interesting world lurking underneath

By William Hughes | May 13, 2022 | 9:00am

Games Features Video games developed in Japan

Salt And Sacrifice manages to overcome a lousy first impression

Salt And Sacrifice Image: Ska Studios

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I did not like Salt And Sacrifice the first time I played it. Like, at all.

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This was seven months ago, when the game’s PR folks first made available the alpha build of the game—a sequel to Salt And Sanctuary, one of the first titles to attempt to do the “Dark Souls but it’s a 2D side-scroller” conceit. Sanctuary has fallen out of the critical conversation in recent years, with titles like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous beating it on vibe, and Death’s Gambit and its ilk refining its spin on 2D Souls combat. But I still had enough lingering affection for Ska Studio’s original game (and their earlier efforts, which helped establish the “Flash Games made good” vibe of the old Xbox Live Arcade) that I wanted to see what the sequel was like…and came away from that first encounter deeply disappointed.

It’s churlish, even in this age of endless Early Access, to ding a game for the failures of a build that is, by its own titling, incomplete. But if managing impressions is important, then that goes doubly for first impressions, and the first impressions given off by Salt And Sacrifice were that its creators had hopped in a cryogenic freezing pod 20 minutes after the first game went gold, and had only re-emerged a few months earlier to make the sequel. The game’s world felt empty and under-explained; its animations stiff and rote; its combat unsatisfying. Nowhere was there an acknowledgement that this weird little sub-genre of a sub-genre had advanced in the intervening period; if anything, the new game felt like a step backward from a prequel that had been modestly pioneering, albeit for a definition of “pioneering” that meant “jamming two extremely popular things together and making it mostly work.”

I didn’t, thus, expect to get much more than a grumbling column out of it when I picked the game up again this week, this time on PS5, on the occasion of its full release. I certainly didn’t expect to be hankering, right now, to go back and play a bit more as soon as I’ve sent this piece off to our editors. It’s actually kind of frustrating; nobody likes having to un-write something off.

But the fact is that those seven months in the game dev oven have done wonders for Salt And Sacrifice. It’s hard for me to put a finger on what, exactly, has changed—I wasn’t making copious notes of my time with that earlier build—but everything about it feels smoother, and more like, well, a complete video game. Even the emptiness I observed in that earlier playthrough now feels more intentional; deliberate desolation, instead of unthinking emptiness.

The game’s not perfect, mind you—Salt only half-knows how to reckon with the difficulties of letting players avoid or mitigate damage on a 2D plane, when the Souls games they’re using as a template offer more three-dimensional avenues of escape. Meanwhile, several critical systems are still under-explained, and the art retains an off-puttingly amateurish quality. (Great monster designs, though.) And yet, Ska has found a compelling twist on the structures of the genre, building mini-missions into the game’s larger levels, and infusing just a jot of Monster Hunter DNA into the soup, inviting you to turn the monstrous Mages you’re tasked with hunting down into a shiny new set of pants. The end result is a surprisingly strong blend of exploration, challenge, and just a bit of that old “Grinding for the good loot” dopamine kick.

It’s enough to make me wonder if studios aren’t damaging themselves a bit by making such early sketches of their games available to press; I had a similar “Yeesh, too early” response to the first press-available builds of Rogue Legacy 2. (I’m still not convinced the latter has changed enough from the first game to justify its existence, but I’m certainly willing to give it a bit more time before passing judgement.) Mostly, though, I’m just happy to see the course correction. Salt And Sacrifice isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a fine little indie game; I’m genuinely glad I went back for that second, fuller look.