9/2/2023 0 Comments Salt and sanctuary mage creed![]() ![]() ![]() It is at this first Sanctuary that you are given the choice to ascribe to one of three Creeds. Sanctuaries are used for healing, leveling up, resupplying your healing flasks and repopulating the world with monsters. Soon, you reach your first titular Sanctuary, the game’s analog to Dark Souls’ Bonfires. Unless, of course, you end up killed by a different hazard. However, it’s worth noting that Salt and Sanctuary’s take on the system is far more merciful than Souls’: Die to a boss and it will take your salt, but if you keep challenging it and failing, your stolen salt will simply be added to the boss’ stockpile and you’ll have a chance to reclaim it all. Of course, in true Souls tradition, your salt is taken from you upon death and you’re given a chance to retrieve it from the foe that killed you. Killing foes awards you with salt, which functions as your experience points. The game supports local multiplayer, and tackling these horrors with a friend offers an additional layer of fun. It helps that they look as fantastic as they do ghoulish the evocatively named Queen of Smiles and That Stench Most Foul are some of my personal favorites. Some of the bosses feel a little bit cheap, others slightly too merciful, but most of them feel like a perfect blend of harsh and fair mechanics that will test your mettle down to its essence. Bosses require you to put all of your skills to the test, watching for tells and dodging or blocking when appropriate. You can switch between two weapon loadouts with the touch of the L1 button this is handy for when you need to deftly equip a shield with no time to mess about in the menu. Daggers deal minimal damage but allow you to strike quickly and repeatedly before running out of stamina, while two-handed greatswords allow two laborious and powerful hits that can launch foes into the air or decapitate them immediately. With no other choice, you press on in search of answers, only to find that this island is a battleground for warring factions of undead - once proud soldiers that are now embroiled in an endless war that has lost all meaning.įighting off your foes with your weapon of choice is immensely satisfying, as each weapon feels appropriately weighty with animations to match. You wash up on the sandy beach of an ethereal island, your crewmates dead and the princess absconded with by unknown kidnappers. The escort doesn’t go according to plan, as these things are wont to do, and the situation quickly turns south when a Cthulhu-esque beast attacks, wrecking the ship in the process. Whether you prefer to play as a straight-up sword & shield attacker or a whip-wielding spell-slinger, Salt and Sanctuary has got you covered.Īfter creating your character, you find yourself aboard a ship, tasked with ferrying a princess to a refuge. It’s astounding just how vast the progression system is, allowing you to shape your character in dozens of different ways. Gray pearls, which are found out and about in the world, can be exchanged to remove a point from the board they also change back into black pearls upon use, so you can respec aspects of your character that you may have been unhappy with. Specific points can bolster your individual stats, unlock the potential to equip certain weapons, armor and spells, or award additional uses of your rechargeable healing flask. Each experience level you gain earns you a black pearl, which you can exchange for a point on the grid. Salt and Sanctuary features a surprisingly large and robust progression system not unlike Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid. Your class governs your starting build, but you don’t have to stick to said build if you’d prefer to experiment. Players customize their looks, pick a starting gift item with a cryptic meaning, and choose from one of several classes - from the usual Knight, Mage and Cleric to the more surprising choices of Chef (complete with frying pan) or Pauper. Upon starting a game of Salt and Sanctuary, the character creation screen will immediately be familiar to fans of Dark Souls. Fortunately, it just so happens to be a successful alchemical recipe: Salt and Sanctuary manages to forge a unique identity out of its adaptation of what it has recycled. Salt and Sanctuary is the latest such “Soulslike”: a title which liberally borrows elements from its inspiration but recontextualizes them in the form of a 2D side-scroller. As the studio continues to revise, retool and remix their winning formula of punishing difficulty, deliberate combat and esoteric storytelling, we’ve started to see challengers to From’s crown as monarch of the modern action RPG. The past few years have been very generous to devotees of From Software’s tough-as-old-leather Souls games.
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