Salt 2: Shores of Gold

I went into Salt 2 hoping the two-person team at Lavaboots Studios had bottled something genuinely transportive, the kind of indie open world where you forget to eat dinner because one more island kept calling. What they have built is quieter, more comfortable, and more divisive than that. The core loop is first-person exploration aboard a ship that functions as a mobile home base. You sail a procedurally generated ocean, dock at islands to fight pirates, skeletons, and wildlife, gather resources, pick up commissions from guild boards and town NPCs, and slowly climb a tiered progression system that unlocks better crafting recipes and pushes you into zones with rarer loot. Navigation leans on a sextant and compass, which adds a satisfying tactile layer that most survival-sandbox games skip entirely. The soundtrack and ocean ambience do real work here. There is a meditative quality to the sailing stretches that critics who warmed to the game consistently praised, and the underwater visuals in particular have drawn genuine admiration from players. The ship customization, with over a hundred placeable decorations, gives the whole thing a cosy-game energy that the pirate skin does not fully prepare you for. That tonal mismatch is where the honest conversation starts. Salt 2 is explicitly, deliberately not a naval combat game. There are no cannons to fire, no ship-to-ship battles, and no PvP. The cooperative mode supports up to five players but runs in instanced spaces, meaning walking into a town shop requires your co-op partner to load in separately, and quest progress is not shared between players. These are not hidden disclaimers: the developers stated the PvE-only focus upfront. The split in the community, sitting around 85 percent positive overall on Steam but dipping into the mid-seventies recently, maps almost perfectly onto whether a player read that before purchasing. Where the game struggles regardless of expectation is combat depth and environmental variety. The first-person combat system has a basic parry, randomised gear traits, and a hidden dice-roll layer that can invalidate headshots and stealth openers seemingly at random, which undercuts any sense of skill expression. Island layouts, while built from handcrafted asset pieces, repeat noticeably within a few hours, and puzzles rarely demand more than reading a nearby note and pulling a lever. The crafting recipe system has a progression gate that some players found genuinely frustrating to unlock, with recipes for mid-tier gear remaining elusive even deep into a playthrough. Boss encounters, outside of a handful tied to specific guild quest chains, offer little mechanical challenge. For a certain kind of player, none of that is a dealbreaker. If you want a low-stakes, unhurried open world to share with a friend or a younger family member, one where the seas never ambush you and the atmosphere does the heavy lifting, Salt 2 delivers that experience with sincerity. Lavaboots clearly love the world they built, and that affection shows in the world-tier progression, the fishing and hunting side activities, and the care put into the sailing feel. Just calibrate your expectations: this is a game about wandering and collecting, not about the thrill of the high seas.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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