Salt and Sanctuary

大名鼎鼎的2D魂，画风独特，虽然2代做歪了，但如果制作组有兴趣做3代，我绝对会再信一次

Превосходный дизайн мира и неплохой лор для такой небольшой игрульки. Действительно вызывает вайбу Dark Souls, в первую очередь миром, в котором можно с самого начала дойти до финала без загрузок, при условии, что все шорткаты открыты. Множество уникальных боссов и противников для каждой локации, некоторым более знаменитым и большим разработчикам стоило бы поучиться у этого проекта. К сожалению, вторая часть пошла другим путём.

Played on Switch originally, but I had to get it on PC. Unironically my favorite soulslike game just because of how it feels to play, as well as the branching options for gameplay

It is hard to recommend this video game because it's a metroidvania that was designed before [i]Hollow Knight[/i] came in to basically modernize the genre. Such as a map to better keep track of your whereabouts, as a metroidvania's core gameplay loop is in its backtracking to unlock new areas that you once couldn't reach. In this game, you eventually obtain "brandings" that unlock new abilities or interactions, such as one that will invert gravity at the numerous black obelisks around the map so that you can walk on the ceilings. This just isn't appealing for gameplay and only adds to your suffering since the metroidvania tag is generally hardcore enough, and combining that with souls-like design, culminating in a hybrid soulsvania product, results in a video game with even more hardcore elementation, and this is yet another video game here on Steam clearly inspired by FromSoftware. You can even stumble upon an NPC in a secret area that refers to you as a "saltborn." Salt, as is part of the game's title, is basically the game's "souls" currency that you use for upgrading your character and equipment and it is something you can risk losing permanently if you die and fail to collect it from what defeated you, as the enemy will basically "take" the salt for itself as if it's a bully and just mugged you of your lunch money. This is an interesting handling of the mechanic, for if you die to a boss, and you likely will, you have to survive against that boss long enough in the rematch for the salt to return to you rather than it just being a sparkle on the ground that you run up to and press A. You don't have to defeat it, just deal enough damage. But, of course, the boss arena is locked from the inside and you cannot exactly retreat unless maybe you use a teleportation item that can bring you back to the shrine. I never attempted this, though, as I always intended to get my vengeance on whatever managed to kill me and I was stubborn enough to just keep throwing myself at the obstacle until it broke. Salt is easy enough to grind by just killing everything you see and enemies will respawn after you've rested at the shrine, as is the case for a souls-like game, and those who are patient and dedicated enough can negate much of the game's difficulty by just spending extra time grinding generic mobs. Despite how the character customization screen is very similar in design to something like [i]Dark Souls[/i], the character upgrade sheet is more along the line of something you'd see in [i]Path of Exile[/i] where it's a huge web-like grid with many different branching paths, but it does lack in that same complexity and creativity that you'll find in other upgrade trees of similar design, as most upgrades are just meant to improve an attribute like strength or dexterity or whatever it is you are prioritizing for your build. You won't allocate points into certain attributes directly from a UI, you convert enough salt into a level-up and you get a skill point that lets you unlock a new 'skill' in the tree, where it's really only unlocking the next tier for your preferred weapon and armor set and following a linear path towards it to ensure you have enough STR or DEX or INT for how your weapon and armor is set to scale. I would have liked to have seen actual abilities, passive or otherwise, in this skill tree. Maybe extra elemental damage if you are playing as a mage type of class, extra attack damage for melee builds, etc. Instead, all you really get is some innocuous flavor text where none of it is even understood as you don't know who or what it is even talking about. There is a grand illusion at play where you think you can create a diverse, unique build within this skill tree due to its many branching choices, but you'll actually ruin your character if you don't do some basic theorycrafting and plan your route based on what weapon you like to use/what you started with, and so every character you play will be more or less the same with a straight line going to your tier five armor and weapon upgrade as quickly as possible. The greatest thing about the game is its stylization, as everything is apparently hand drawn and I have respect for that. Even though it's the same gritty, dark and creepy atmospheric tone that these souls-like games always rely on in order to deliver something that conveys a sense of hopelessness and corruption, it helps with the game's originality when you draw everything by hand, but the art design doesn't really make the rest of it any good and it needed more polishing. In fact, the heavy influence from [i]Dark Souls[/i] is just too derivative here even with the 2D twist on it. It feels like the developers just wanted to create the next [i]Dark Souls[/i] but as a 2D platformer, and this is something many other studios attempted to do in some form or another. There really isn't enough fresh ideas added to the game to not just make me want to go and replay a FromSoftware game instead or a better metroidvania that at least tries to respect my limited time. Beyond the game lacking even just a basic map, the controls are somewhat clunky and it feels unresponsive at times. For whatever reason, this is a common issue with video games designed in a 2D space, and when you add in a parkour element, it just compounds onto the frustration you can experience when moving your character around the area and you are expecting it to be smoother than what it actually is. Other traditional metroidvanias have much more fluid movement and animations where jumping doesn't feel imprecise, wall-grabbing isn't inconsistent, and I also noticed an occasional issue with attacking or rolling nearby edges and corners. There's noticeably bad hit detection, especially against bosses, and it becomes less something that you can improve due to a mistake you made and more of an issue with the game deterring you. Unfortunately, you can only really do so much within a 2D game. It was fun to experiment and see how I could chain into different attacks with my weaponry of choice, but the boasting about 600+ weapons and armor is a misnomer as there's only a few weapon types that each weapon will categorize as and so it'll attack relatively the same regardless. There surely isn't thousands of unique animation sets in total, and so you either have a big stick that shoots magic or you have a big sword that slashes and stabs or you have a bow that shoots arrows. I decided to use randomization to select what class I'd start off as and it selected hunter, and I seldom found myself bothering with anything but the whip and crossbow. In trying of other classes, there's some blatant balancing issues where certain classes are innately stronger than others and the same holds true for weapons. Most of the bosses themselves are not really that interesting nor original in their actual design, although a few were pretty cool in design like the Queen of Smiles, she just suffered from the same issues many other bosses had where she only had two or three attacks. They can be challenging but for many of the bosses, the challenge largely comes from their freedom to spam attacks without any stamina drain and the presence of 1-hit instakills which is considered closer to artificial difficulty than true authentic challenge. There's also a lack of another modern expectation: the ability to glance downward even just slightly so that you can try and determine if there's a platform below you that would otherwise be off-screen. The amount of times I died to fall damage because I surely thought there'd be a platform but there wasn't was just too cheap. The ambitious blending of multiple genres into one package exposes too many rough edges in its execution and it's one of those games where you really need to use a Wikia to mitigate some of the issues and pains it'll cause. Most of my playtime in the game is just being lost and confused on where to go next. Because, again, no map.

One of the best souls-like to have ever been conceived. I don't have many hours here on Steam but that is because i mostly played this gem when it went free on the Epic Game Store. This game has such a unique artstyle, flow and world to it. I can't describe fully how much i love this game and how many playthroughs i did, saying all of this i think i need to say one final thought. "♥♥♥♥ UNICORNS, THOSE SPIKY HEADED SONS OF BIT*CHES** SHOULD BURN IN HELLFIRE!".

尼玛了个抽比的，你通关的时候给个确认提示能尼玛司马？？？？？艹尼玛的40个小时两个号一次点稻草人一次跳井，尼玛的正常人没试过不试试看有没有东西？？？？？尼玛直接结局了我东西都没拿完这么长时间全你妈浪费了，傻种设计。。。。。。

boss设计的是你妈个b