![]() The economy is divided by salt – used for leveling up, upgrading your gear and killing you in real life when you are hypertensive – and gold – practically for buying items. Crucial decisions have to be made, as you can’t “kick” a NPC once you summoned them into the sanctuary. You find these statues along the various locations available, and include merchants, clerics, mages, blacksmiths and others. You decide what NPCs it will have, using a maximum of four statues per sanctuary. When you get to a bonfire, I mean, a sanctuary (the resting place), it’s normally empty. Salt and Sanctuary provides some quite original mechanics to the genre. When you have an excellent control of your character, which responses as fast as you need in every situation, you can’t be mad about difficulty. Nevertheless, I wasn’t angry with the difficulty of my first walkthrough. Later, when I created my second character, a spellcaster, I noticed the journey became much more easier. I decided to be a strength dependant knight, without caring too much on focus (mana) and the eventual use of bow and arrows. A huge ability tree to pick new stats upgrades from may confuse everyone at first. We have a precise and fast-paced combat, with an enormous list of melee weapons – axes, swords, spears, whips, reapers, hammers and more – and powerful – perhaps a bit too much – spells. Like any hard video game, it demands your time, patience and the skill of not throwing away your console after the boss killed you with 1 HP remaining. Leaving the deep dumb analogy behind, I have to be honest with you. On the contrary, it was exciting and captivating. The best part – and key difference – is that the lack of guidance and help didn’t felt unfair. That reminded me of another game we all played: life. I was constantly facing myself with the unknown, and in the end I found out I still didn’t know pretty much anything about this world. Sadly, I did all of the above in my first walkthrough (17 hours) and still didn’t know what half of the items were for, what some NPCs were really looking for, how to discover a bunch of sweet secrets or what was the main purpose of everything. The real tutorial relies on having to speak to some ambiguous characters, read items’s descriptions and do a great deal of trials and errors. You are half naked in the jungle with a knife, do what you can, mate. We have a pretty succinct tutorial at the beginning of the journey, explaining the basic movements, and that’s it. Playing Salt and Sanctuary is being affraid of every corner of the screen, not only because anyone and anything – traps and bad jumps – can kill you, but the nervous sensation of not knowing where to go, what is that over there and what the hell you are doing every five minutes. However, like Lovecraft once said: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. Salt and Sanctuary isn’t a horror game, despite the fact it has some evident elements from the genre. ![]() One with an specific sensation all over it: fear.ĭon’t get me wrong. Ska Studios crafted not only a fantastic video game but a mesmerizing experience. A few weeks ago, Switch owners gained the opportunity to dive into new obscure and punishing lands. It was originally released two years ago for the PS4, PSVita and PC. Salt and Sanctuary is a wonderful but demanding 2D Action RPG game. (Saw what I did there?) I could go on, but you get the idea. Strange but charismatic NPCs with anxious souls. Dark locations with labyrinthine designs, created specially for getting lost. Messages that players left on the ground – expect trolling, of course. Every enemy can kill you with a few hits, even the weakest one. Special places where you can level up, obtain a checkpoint, “rest” and make unique decisions. Huge enemy bosses whose pattern you have to discover. So, here we go:Ĭountless deaths with the possibility of recovering what you have lost. Plus, there are already enough memes about it. The thing is, if I produce any more “ X game is like D*** ***ls with…” I will have to end my career as a writer. ![]() It isn’t personal, I love those games – as much as I hate them. I will list some features but I won’t name the franchise I’m describing.
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