Salt & Sacrifice: When You Crave That Mineral

[Gaer]

Anyone pick up Salt & Sacrifice? It’s the sequel to Salt & Sanctuary, but this time you’re an Elf and have done Elf Crimes.

To avoid being straight up murdered by the Elf State you undertake the Mage Rite which gives you the illness the Souls disease where you can’t die.

You’re told to go hunt Evil Mages terrorizing the countryside as your way to atonement. Or die. Either or, the State don’t give a fuck.

So it’s pretty fun I find, and you’re encouraged to branch out with various weapons rather than sticking with only one.

Notably, weapons don’t contribute to encumbrance so you can be running around in light armour and use the heaviest Berserk Greatsword without an issue.

The other cool thing with that is that buying into a Weapon Class also gets you a base stat. (Eg. Knives give you Will to increase you’re max Stamina, while weeb swords give you Dexterity.)

And to be honest you need to branch out because not every weapon type gets it’s own version of every Element.

They also really improved the thrown weapon category. Every “Class” has one, and they’re easy to use (I recommend the “Release to Throw” option, personally), and they do a lot of damage. Like a lot a lot. I beat the first non-instagib boss per Souls Tradition by playing Keep Away.

The trade off is that they use consumable Iroha Ore that you can find everywhere and can purchase rather early on. So far I haven’t got anything else worth spending my money on so I just stock up more every time I head back to the Not-Nexus.

Also there’s a lot of fun stuff they’ve done with bosses and the aforementioned Mages you’re supposed to hunt. There are six base elements (and subsequent Mages), but you can also get combinations of two Elements: Lightning’s for instance, is Fire + Light. This brings up a total of twenty-one different Mages to hunt. And that’s not counting regular bosses too!

Hunting Mages gets you drops, which let you make weapons and armour. It’s like Monster Hunter and Souls had a baby that way— there’s very little gear you get in other methods really.

There’s co-op and pvp just like Souls games but I’m not paying for PSN+ and like Souls games I refuse to play it online anyway so I don’t know anything about it.

They also draw faces better this time round!

I’ve been really enjoying it, though my biggest complaint is the lack of a map. This game is so much larger than Salt & Sanctuary and I keep forgetting places that need a MacGuffin travel ability to use to explore further.

Anyone else pick this up? Currently it’s only for PC and PS4/PS5 (they even made PS5 specific client!), but I know @JBear enjoyed the first game for instance.

So cmon friends: Go. Hunt.

 

[jpfriction]

Forgot it was coming, I’ll be picking it up immediately.

 

[Nodal]

I was literally about to ask if they added a map as that was my biggest issue with the first one.

 

[JBear]

I did indeed love Salt and Sanctuary, and spent a lot of time cheerleading it. There's been a lot of 2D Souls-likes since, but it's still my favourite. The two biggest criticisms that I recall from other people were "ugly faces" and "no map", so I guess they're batting 50% on that for the sequel? FWIW, I never felt like I needed a map, but I tend to be very adept at mentally mapping games, and even then, hearing that this map is much bigger does give me pause in that regard.

In any case, I look forward to playing it... in one year, when it comes to Steam. I have nothing against Epic, but I do have something against installing a second storefront and fracturing my games library, so I'm content to wait. It'll sit next to Darkest Dungeon 2 as the games I'm most eagerly waiting to come from Epic to Steam.

 

[Gaer]

I guess you don’t have a PS4 either? I don’t know how well it runs on that, however.

It’s a shame that it’s locked to Epic for now, it’s a fantastic refinement of Salt & Sanctuary and adds a lot of really fun innovations!

Now if only I could beat that stupid Umbralmancer. My fucking Dark defence is super high now and everything! It would probably help if I could get good at literally any other weapon type except the Twindaggers.

But at this point, I’ll need to roll a new character with a different starting weapon to break the habit since I have some incredibly overpowered Class 5 set of Twindaggers which I might have leaned on, along with my throwing knives since early mid-game to get me through everything.

And it’s worked! Except this fucker! Ugh!