Salt and Sanctuary

神作无需多言

Yes.

It's pretty good and fun, I had a great time playing this game (Up to a point). It's exploration is solid, combat's fun and surprisingly flashy, and weapons have unique playstyles attached. The amount of lore in this game is nothing short of incredible too, so many little details and clues about the world itself, not just the island your stuck on. I only noticed two issues that I believe are objectively bad, one of which is only with a specific boss. Issue one, the death system. In souls games, you typically drop your souls where you last died. Here, the enemy that killed you absorbs your salt, your soul equivalent in this game, and becomes stronger (Or becomes an enemy if you died to the environment), and if you die again at any point before killing the enemy in question, it's gone. I think this is a mistake, since the way death works in most souls games is sort of like a challenge. "Hey, you want your souls back? Prove it wasn't a fluke you got that far." Here, it's straight up a punishment. "Ugh, you died? I hope that was a fluke, because if not, that's embarrassing. Better kill them while they're even stronger, or else all that salts gone." Oh, also you lose some gold guaranteed, with no way to reclaim it. I think the devs were aware of this problem to an extent, because bosses only need a portion of health to be lost in order to reclaim your salt, not that you can leave the arena, but at least it gives you a solid chance of keeping the salt if it's an easier boss. The primary issue with this kind of death mechanic is that it discourages exploration. In dark souls, if you see a scary looking enemy, you can give it a try knowing you only need to make it back here in order to retrieve your souls if it turns out that was a mistake. Here, doing that risks losing all the salt you have, because not only will you HAVE to kill that scary enemy to get back your salt if it was a mistake, but you'll need to kill a powered up version of it, second try. So my immediate reaction to seeing a challenging but fun looking area, is not, "Ooh, that looks fun!" But, "Oh, I've got a lot of salt, don't want to risk it." The second is a boss that I think is in the midgame, a dragon. Now, when I reached this thing, I was using a dagger. Why do I bring this up? Because in order to prevent people from just hiding in the middle of the boss and avoid most of its attacks, the game pushes you away from it if your not in the middle of a dodge. It's way too large though, and I was frequently pushed so far away my dagger couldn't hit it most of the time. I had to switch to my unupgraded spear just to hit it more consistently. To make matters worse, the hitboxes for it's tail swipe and grounded fire breath attacks are terrible. The tail swipe hits both in front and behind, so you have to time your dodge when its tail is just about to reach the middle, but it's super unclear and I eventually went from "how did that hit me?" to "I hate this move" VERY quickly simply due to how often the attack lands on me when I dodge it. Now, already pretty annoying, but remember how I said you have to wait? Well, it's too quick to react, so you have to wait until the tail moves and react to the overall movement rather than a specific point of the movement. I say this, because the fire breath attack has very similar startup, and if you wait too long to dodge to the other side, a bit of fire actually goes BEHIND the dragon and hits you. Not for much damage, but it adds to the tail hitbox issue. You can't wait for the absolute last moment, because that could lead to attrition from the fire breath if you're wrong about the tail swipe, and if you do it to early, you get hit by the tail instead. It sucks, but the absolute most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ part, is when it flies. Sometimes, it will fly off into the sky, and do the cinematic fire breath midflight, forcing you to try and outrun it. I like this attack a lot, on paper. It's cinematic, and it always flies toward the side of the screen it will be breathing fire from when it starts the attack, making it pretty easy to predict and avoid... in theory. In practice, it's actually super luck based to avoid, as sometimes it will start breathing fire late enough in its flight that you'll run out of space to run from it before it stops breathing fire, and take a guarunteed hit, outright oneshotting you if your unlucky enough. You can sometimes avoid this by running towards and getting behind the dragon before it start shooting fire, but that's also risky, because it might start spitting fire immediately. I'm 99% certain this is a mandatory boss, so I ragequit here. I think it's a really good game, however, and I recognise that these two issues being the lowest points really speaks to the games quality. I do recommend the game, just be ready for a brick wall with that boss fight, and be careful when exploring new areas when carrying a lot of salt.

PS5で一度クリアしました。 PC版ではあまりプレイしてませんが、PS版でクリア済なのでおすすめです。 PS5版（PS4かな？）では一度クリアした後、ニューゲーム＋をしようとしたら最初のアイテムを取ったにもかかわらずセーブポイントを開けない進行不可バグに遭遇しました。 PCではなかろうと購入しましたが、結局あまりプレイしてません。 そのうち、プレイすると思いますが、ほんと、まんま、ダクソの2D版です。 ダクソの雰囲気が好きな人ははまると思います。

Despite being short and relatively easy, i still enjoyed it, it was goo.

Some of the traps feel janky as ♥♥♥♥, and it makes losing your salt feel like a cheap and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ experience.