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★★★ Salt and Sanctuary Switch
As I’ve mentioned before, the Nintendo Switch is suffering a lack of big, exclusive, AAA titles. The majority of its library is composed of ports of older games from months or years ago and cheap, throwaway indie titles.
But if we’re stuck with this undesirable situation then at least we occasionally get games like Salt and Sanctuary, which is technically a cheap indie title but stands head and shoulders above its peers in so many ways.
It’s described as the “2D Dark Souls”, and while I don’t often find trite pigeonholing helpful, it’s so apt in this case it’s impossible to argue. Salt and Sanctuary isn’t just a platformer inspired by Dark
Souls, it’s a blatant rip-off. Not that it’s a bad thing, and if the Dark Souls developers don’t mind, then I don’t mind, because the game is great and this is my third time purchasing it.
Players create a character from one of several classes which determines their starting skills and equipment and enter a dark fantasy world in search of a lost princess. There are no restrictions on how you develop your character over the course of the game, meaning you can focus on using any of the weapons, spells or items you find to deal with the army of merciless enemies and bosses standing in your way. As you defeat enemies, you earn “salt” — the currency used to level up your character and learn new skills. If you die you have one chance to reach the spot where you died to reclaim your salt, but if you die again en route, it’s lost for good. That’s the main Dark Souls comparison, but it also has equivalents of many other elements, including armour and equipment weighing your character down unless you boost your equip load stat, factions you can join to acquire benefits, and leaving messages in the game world alerting other players to secrets or imminent traps.
The storytelling is also sparse, mostly gleaned from observing background details or terse conversations with the few friendly characters. The game has a deliciously desolate atmosphere of oppression and hopelessness — the kind of thing that really cheers me up.