Salt and Sanctuary Still Plays Like a Souls Game Drawn by Hand

Salt and Sanctuary arrived on the PlayStation 4 on March 15, 2016. Ska Studios developed and published it. Later releases carried it to Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It is a 2D action role-playing game, heavily inspired by the Dark Souls series by FromSoftware.

Trailer, via Ska Studios.

A Shipwreck, a Princess, and a Kraeken

The game opens with the player stowed away on a ship carrying a princess from an unnamed country. She is to be married to the king of an opposing country to avert war. Marauders attack the ship and murder its crew. Kill them all and reach the deck, and a giant “Kraekan” — a corruption of kraken, resembling Cthulhu — rises from the sea. Win or lose that fight, the ship is wrecked and the player drifts ashore on a mysterious island.

There a strange old man hands over an icon of one of three creeds the player claims membership in, and the quest to find the lost princess begins. Plant the icon in the first Sanctuary, then explore. Salt is the currency of power here. The island’s two kinds of human explain why. Saltborn are largely composed of salt; Lightborn are made of light. A dead Saltborn is sent to the Isle of Salt. A dead Lightborn simply ceases to exist. Lightborn can become gods. Saltborn cannot.

600 Items and a Skill Tree With Hundreds of Combinations

Salt and Sanctuary combines aspects of the Metroidvania and Soulslike genres. The visuals are 2D and hand drawn. Stamina matters. Builds matter. There are 600 items players may use, and several weapon categories carry special movesets including air attacks. Two-handed weapons hit harder. Shields defend and parry. Magic and ranged attacks are on the table too.

Origins, classes and stat development sit on top of an extensive skill tree providing hundreds of combinations. Local multiplayer covers co-operative and versus play. Asynchronous features let players exchange messages. Progression runs on skill trees, equipment upgrades and discovery rather than on a single linear path.

The world is dark and interconnected, full of hostile enemies and challenging bosses. Fog-shrouded valleys. Grinning, mossy corpses clinging to rusted arms. Shambling figures stirring. Beneath crumbling, salt-worn structures, labyrinthine passageways lead to unspeakable evil long forgotten by man.

The Scarecrow and the Copies of the World

Side stories belong to an unnamed Knight, a Thief and a Sorcerer. A highly sinister talking Scarecrow threatens that the player will perish. Talk to these characters long enough and the island’s secret surfaces: it is made up of copies of dangerous locations from the various continents of the world, and some kind of power “collected” them.

The source describes the Scarecrow this way:

The player also meets a highly sinister talking Scarecrow that threatens that they will perish.

The island’s secret is the game’s central turn. The player learns it by talking to non-player characters scattered across the map. Salt and Sanctuary keeps its cosmology — Saltborn, Lightborn, the Isle of Salt — in the background while the exploration carries the weight.

Release Schedule

What Holds Up

The hand-drawn art gives the salt-worn architecture and the mossy corpses a texture that a cleaner style would flatten. The 600 items and the hundreds of skill tree combinations are the reason a second run plays differently from the first. The parry window, the two-handed commitment, the air attacks — each one asks for a decision.

The local multiplayer is the weakest piece. Co-operative and versus play exist, but they are local, and asynchronous messages are a thin substitute for the shared world the genre’s best entries build. The plot’s back half leans on the reveal that the island copies real places. It lands as exposition delivered by non-player characters rather than as something the player discovers by moving through the world.

Still, the ambition is real. A studio built a game with 600 usable items, a skill tree with hundreds of combinations, and a cosmology where Saltborn and Lightborn are separated by what happens after death. Salt and Sanctuary asks what that structure looks like when the world is smaller, the camera is side-on, and every corridor was drawn by hand.

The sequel, Salt and Sacrifice, followed in 2022. Salt and Sanctuary scores 8.5 of 10, per the IGDB critic aggregate across 10 outlets. That score is the fairest measure of what this one is: a Soulslike that earned its following without a large team behind it.

Indie Games · Metroidvania · Salt and Sacrifice · Salt and Sanctuary · Ska Studios · Soulslike