Salt and Sanctuary

Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D action RPG built in the image of FromSoftware's Souls series, developed almost entirely by a two-person studio. You die, you lose your salt (read: souls), you fight back to recover it or lose it forever. The rhythm is immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time with Dark Souls, but the 2D plane and hand-drawn art direction give it an identity that feels earned rather than derivative. Combat is fast, twitchy, and deliberate in equal measure - positioning and stamina management matter just as much here as they do in any 3D Souls game, and the hitboxes are generally honest enough to make death feel instructional rather than cheap. The RPG skeleton underneath all the suffering is genuinely impressive for a small indie release. The skill tree - called the Sanctuary system - is a sprawling web of stat nodes and class-locked abilities that rewards planning and punishes brainless point-dumping. You can build toward strength-heavy melee, dexterity-focused weapon arts, faith-based magic, arcane sorcery, or weird hybrid combinations that do not fully come online until late in the game. The 600-plus weapons, armor pieces, spells, and items are not padding - a meaningful chunk of them have distinct movesets or spell interactions, and hunting down a specific weapon for a build you theorycrafted is one of the game's quiet pleasures. Past hour 40, the build variety holds up, which is more than most genre peers can claim. Worldbuilding is delivered through item descriptions, NPC fragments, and environmental storytelling rather than voiced cutscenes, which suits the bleak maritime-fantasy setting perfectly. The lore is dark, layered, and rewarding to piece together if you care to look. What does not work quite as well is the pacing in the mid-game, where certain zones drag and a handful of enemy types feel recycled past the point of acceptable. Boss quality is also uneven - some fights are genuinely memorable tests of pattern recognition, while others are big damage sponges with predictable telegraphs. The game also lacks the navigation polish of its inspirations; a few areas suffer from confusing layouts that waste your time rather than building tension. For players who want a Souls-adjacent fix without committing to a 60-hour open world, Salt and Sanctuary is a focused, mechanically dense package. The difficulty is real but fair for anyone with patience. The narrative rewards careful readers. The build depth rewards replayability. What it lacks in budget polish it largely compensates for with authorial vision - Ska Studios clearly knew exactly what game they were making, and they made it well. Monika, Scout Team