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[Mipe]

Potion chugging every few seconds? Really? Sorry, but that's a big turnoff for me.

[BlackFlyme]

I haven't seen another thread on this, and I don't particularly want to make a new one myself, so I'm bumping this old one.

Salt & Sanctuary came out on PC last week. I have been enjoying it. Though it has left me feeling a bit salty at times.

[nenjin]

It's caught my attention too. A friend of mine has it and says he's in love with it, but he's a self-admitted fanboi of the developer so that probably helps. His one complaint is that combat can be stiff at times. Better than 8-bit Castlevania but somehow more wooden that more recent action games. But he's never felt cheated by the game due to this, which is important. And apparently people have bare knuckle boxed an early game boss you're not supposed to beat...so it seems like Dark Souls, winning is all on you, the skills and gears and levels merely make it easier to compensate for your mistakes.So that's good. I think it'll be the next game I buy.

edit

After playing about 45 minutes and dying to the first boss, all I'll say right now is that my biggest enemy is ingrained Dark Souls input memory.

[nenjin]

So this game is an almost 100% unabashed love letter to Dark Souls.

Let me go down the checklist:

-Vague story, meaningful imagery.
-Winning is all about you, not the gear or the levels.
-A somewhat simplified stat system that still has the key note stuff like equipment load, stability, poise (I think.)
-Armor and weapons function the same: they scale to stats, shields block a flat % of damage types and armor is a total value assessed from all your gear vs. various attack types.
-Big bosses with huge swings and telegraphed attacks.
-Lots of items of every variety, from cloth up to plate.
-The same knight, heavy knight, assassin, hunter, cleric, mage class and item arrangement.
-Bonfires, essentially.
-Covenants, essentially.
-Equipment durability, except it's fatigue which I think is stat derived instead of gear derived.
-Estus flasks, essentially.
-Same leveling system.
-Most items that can be picked up looking like a glowing orb of something.
-Darkness.
-Death traps.
-Spells.
-Player messages.
-Sin.

Differences though, and most of them I think play pretty well to Dark Soul's core strengths, while also injecting some Metroid-vania style elements.
-In-game Bestiary.
-Platforming and numerous hidden passages.
-Sprawling non-linear level design where things tend to wrap around once you complete them.
-Players that have died in the area recently show up as hung corpses and stuff near the level starts.
-NPC vendors and "summons" you can populate the different sanctuaries with.
-Trinkets (separate from rings.)
-You lose max health progressively as you get hit (they're called wounds.) However there are spells and items which remove wounds and heal your max HP. It hasn't become too onerous yet but I suspect it starts getting nastier later in game and serves as a check on rampant exploration.
-You heal back to full max HP when you die, instead of losing max HP like in Dark Souls. There's no Humanity mechanic.
-Instead, you get penalized 10% of your gold.
-All in all death stings less here, because fights are quicker and the penalties don't stack up.
-When you are killed by an enemy, they hold all your salt on them and get double HP. This can be sort of a problem for mini-bosses. Not sure if regular bosses get any stronger.
-When you die from falling or to something other than an enemy, a monster is spawned that holds your salt, and get stronger the more salt you had when you died.
-Sort of faction warfare where you can oust other factions from the sanctuaries and take them over for your's. (You have limited options in a non-allied faction's sanctuary.)
-Local coop. (I think up to 3 other players can jump in playing different generic NPC sellswords and other classes.)
-The delivery of some of the NPCs is a little generic and straightforward compared to DS. Like, none of the NPCs have names, other than generic titles like "Cleric", "Merchant", "Sellsword" But it makes up for it in other places, like item descriptions which include lore-y bits.
-Combat is faster than Dark Souls 2 at least. But it feels like there's way more wiggle room here for getting hit. Playing as a knight there is way less "2 shot and you're dead" from normal trash guys.
-Shield seems super OP, and stamina regen feels super fast. The last couple "big guys" i've fought I've basically just shield tanked them from the front and constantly slipped damage in where I could, drinking a couple flasks to top off the health that gets chipped away on block. Put another way, guys seems to way less tendency to hit you so hard you stagger even from a full stamina bar. I really struggled with one boss because, based on my training from Dark Souls, you can't abuse block, you really gotta mix it up between blocks and dodges and know which attacks you can't block. But once I realized I could block 2, 3, even 4 of his big swings and still not be stamina drained, things got about 1000x easier.
-Shield blocking seems to automatically orient you toward the closest attacker or thing about to hit you. It's very responsive, including mid-air blocks.

I'm really enjoying it. I just beat Dark Souls 2 and have been kinda of aimlessly avoiding another SP game, caught between wanting more Dark Souls but not being ready to buy DS3 or invest more time in DS2. S&S totally scratches the itch while being just different enough and skillfully executed to be interesting on its own merits. Combat is super satisfying, lots of screen shake, crunching sounds, blood sprays and blood spraying on the walls, decapitations, flying body parts, big knock back physics...it's good times. Hitting guys rapidly gives you that c-c-c-c-combo feel that Dark Souls doesn't really accomplish with its rather stayed animations and combat feel. The visuals in S&S have the dank turned up to 11 and they might be an acquired taste but I dig it. (My only complaint with the visuals is the fact no one has a nose and everyone has the same almost iguana-looking eyes.)

I have no real comment on the story as of yet. The premise is basic but obviously there's more going on in the world. (You choose your skin tone based on one of the several nations and races of the world, complete with a ready-made pantheon of deities.) It feels a little like your own homebrewed RPG world with random fantasy names and so I'm not really buying it yet, or the salt as anything other than an homage/joke and all the other world buildy bits. The story is: there's been a long war and you're delivering a princess to a foreign nation so her marriage can seal the peace treaty. And of course, stuff goes horribly wrong and you end up on this island full of the undead and horrible shit, with no real idea where the Princess is or where you're going. You're clearly not dead; when you die you return to the Sanctuary and see yourself being dragged by "a mysterious cleric" who helps himself to some money in your pouch. Everything is presented in the same airy, mostly unexplained way Dark Souls does it, except for the occasion blunt NPC being like "I sell things" or telling you how an in-game mechanic works. There's more than a hint of self-awareness what the game's doing, little obvious American indie humor bits thrown in there like "A Potato" as an item saying you can throw it an enemy. In the end, I don't know if the game is going to try to really deliver a story like Dark Souls does in its own subtle way....or if it's just going to ride purely on the spooky occult imagery and gore and fog all the way to the end.

If you've ever looked at Dark Souls and been interested but felt like it was too much of a commitment, I'd say this is a pretty low impact way to get introduced to Souls-esqe gameplay. I don't think of myself as great at Dark Souls but once I wrapped my head around how this game does things vs. Dark Souls, I've been making steady unimpeded progress. I don't think this game is as frustrating as Dark Souls can be for various reasons....namely it feels like the combat mechanics are balanced in your favor instead of in the enemy's favor.

My only real complaints are these:

-No map. There are a lot of possible directions to go and kind of like Castlevania aRPGs, you can spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what to do next.
-There's some input buffering issues it feels like. Trying to attack after you've been blocking often causes you to parry instead of actually attack, which will fail and you'll get a sword in your guts. The timing is such that trying to alternate blocking and attacking you can get stuck in a loop of leaving yourself open to attack. There's also issues with direction facing but they're not too bad...you just have to be deliberate.

[nenjin]

Yeah, this is definitely an easier game than Dark Souls that I've played. Gear upgrades are very clearly mapped out and you can just buy the vast majority of mats in unlimited quantities from the vendors, once you've progressed far enough. It's very farmable once you get into the swing of things. Where spell casting in Dark Souls generally made for easier fights, here I dunno. There's a lot of penalties on magic. Instead of attunement slots and # of casts, when you cast a spell in S&S you lose max stamina, which you can then heal with "magic" potions. There are also way more quality shields early on than in DS it seems like. Plenty of 100% slash/impact/elemental shields within the first hour or two.

The skill tree is kinda lame IMO though. It's pretty much just a gating mechanism for gear and for raising stats. There are exactly zero "perk-like" buys on the skill tree. On the one hand it's good because it keeps it simple, because the tree is pretty huge. On the other though it feels like a missed opportunity for a couple cool things to get at the ends of the skill tree.

Played some local coop with a friend today, it was a blast. Other than the game deciding to move a player next to their buddy who is plummeting off screen, it works pretty well. The other player can indeed make a full character for themselves, and acquire salt, levels, money and gear. They just don't get any quest items. Enemy HP and damage scales up and it makes for some pretty intense fights. Bosses by and large seem pretty easy though. Of like the 7 I've killed only 2 really gave me problems, and that was more getting over excited instead of playing it cool and smart. I really hope they implement online coop. Having 4 people tooling around would make for some crazy fights.

There is no real story as far as I can see, even by Dark Soul's standards. There's plenty of background and world information, just nothing that really explains or justifies all the different castles and dungeons you're crawling through. It's unfortunate because a good story would really elevate this game up a whole 'nother level. It's still pretty good without much of one though.

[BlackFlyme]

There is a little bit of justification for why this island is the way it is, but I'm not spoiling anything. An NPC you have to interact with will explain it.

Personally, I've been rocking big two-handed weapons. Great-swords seem to hit so much harder than other weapons, while still being a reasonably quick weapon type. Great-axes and Great-Hammers feel way too slow, on the other hand.

[nenjin]

It's one-handers for me. Most bosses seem highly susceptible to their attacks getting interrupted even from small weapons, so hitting them with a quick 3 to 4 hit combo lets you put out a lot of damage quickly, and steam roll most normal enemies. I did just get the Sodden Knight's Great Sword though and I'm looking forward to playing with that.

[nenjin]

I'm still a little so-so on the story.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The flavor and lore on items and descriptions and the bestiary is great but I don't feel like it translates to the story very well. It all feels very disconnected. I get how it's an homage to DS's weird half dreamlike wanderings. But its reason for tying it all together seems a little weak. Maybe I'm just jaded because the approach is so much like Dark Souls. FWIW the world they describe sounds cool. I just don't feel like it connects to the larger narrative very well.

Or maybe it's simply this: Dark Soul's biggest conceit, that you're dead and you'll rise again until you win or give up, is presented to you right at the start of all the games first thing. In Salt & Sanctuary, the central conceit of the game is ambiguous through the vast majority of the game. (You can easily miss some characters that try to explain your surroundings and the state of things.) Are you alive? Did you die on the ship? Are you even who you think you are, doing what you thought you were doing? I like games that have this kind of ambiguity but overall, combined with the the nods and winks, kinda makes it hard for me to really get into the setting.

Anyways, almost 40 hours in and I still haven't beaten it. It's a surprisingly long game if you are methodical about getting all the hidden goodies.

Pretty much up until last night, I felt the game was "fair." You got your build, and with the right reflexes and fight knowledge, you can beat most fights with a minimum of getting wrekt.

That all changed with the Witch of the Lake.

Ho-lee shit. When I fought Murdellia Mal I thought I had seen how bad it can be when the game is exploiting one of your defense weaknesses. I've been rolling with the Sodden Knight's armor fairly upgraded for most of the game. So, great physical resistances, average fire resistance, great lightning resistance, crappy poison arcane and holy resists. Whatever I was missing I could put in a shield for and it would be all good.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Witch of the Lake just completely wrecked me in a couple seconds. I died to her probably 30+ times before I finally beat her. Her one flurry of bolts attack just punched through me and my shield like it wasn't even there (100/100 Light Dark. Maybe it was a lightning attack?), basically turning everything in a cone extending away from her as a guaranteed kill zone. Even after accounting for that attack being instant death, it took plenty more deaths to learn how to (possibly) evade some her other attacks. The little dark bat things were fairly easy (although lined up correctly they just completely ruin you if you were standing X distance away from her.) Her claw attacks were obnoxious but managable. It was that orb that shoots a barrage of lightning or something at you that took the longest to figure out. (You wait til the first bolt almost hits you and then roll away.) Unfortunately whether you can dodge the attack is entirely relative to your angle. If you're in the "death zone" the angle becomes shallow enough the furthest bolts adjust to your position even after you roll and you get struck. Too close and you can get them to shoot downward at you.....but you have less time to dodge, and once you start getting hit by pretty much any of these attacks, you're getting hit by all of them. And as you're recovering from your roll to avoid that attack.....she floats, puts you right in the death zone and then frags you with that flurry attack.

So with all these horrible attacks that seek you out, her pinpoint accuracy in positioning to use them on you, and the sheer randomness of how they're used (the attack that was pretty much guaranteed to kill me if I let her get too far from was also the only attack I could consistently get damage on her.), on top of that you add her going off screen so you can't even see what she's about to hit you with......and this fight was by far the worst I've seen. It wasn't that it was hopeless, I did a shit load of damage to her with a 2-hander enchanted with lighting. But screwing up (as in not being standing directly next to her) was pretty much a death sentence every time.

To date the bosses that have given me the most trouble are all casters of a sort. Mad Alchemist, Witch of the Lake, TSMF. Others I've struggled against but eventually beaten without feeling like the timing was too hard to pull off or the bosses too random. But those three, with the Witch at the top, felt like the toughest.

If this were Dark Souls it'd be "well just go grab a robe you found to use for the fight." But it's not quite like that in S&S, because all the armor is locked away deeply in trees behind a shit load of points. So it's not as easy to slap a robe on (or a shield for that matter) for specific fights. Within your armor group is ok as long as you have the variety there. But I swear 90% of the armor I've found in T2 and T3 has spell resists as bad if not worse than Dopplesoldner armor.

In the end even the toughest bosses I've found just usually  require attention and patience to beat once you've got a strategy to work out. WotL was the first one that made me feel it was pretty much random when or where the fight would become unbeatable for me. The number of times she would just move an inch then quick fire that flurry attack was maddening.

I switched over to using two-handed weapons and in some ways, given how the late game plays out, it's good. It is super fun just jump slamming most of my problems away. I can one or two shot most guys but if I miss or if I get two quick attacking opponents or more....shit goes south pretty quick. Maybe I need armor with higher balance, it seems like with Tier 2 Armor I can't get swings off anymore if I'm being attacked.

I also learned how bad it can be to die to the wrong enemy. The goddamn Crypt Keepers turn into a nightmare when they've killed you; doesn't matter if they're actually holding salt or not. Their HP doubles, they get faster and they do significantly more damage. I couldn't figure out why, when I had stupidly died to a Crypt Keeper by trying to run past them, he proceeded to kill me the next 10 attempts I made on him. I was puzzled and really frustrated. Then I started paying attention after I slew him and fought him again and realized how much tougher they are with your salt. You don't notice it in the early game, but, when you start relying on consistent animations speeds, damage and most importantly, those 1-hit kills before the enemy does something horrible, when all those things suddenly change and it scales up with the enemy, who kills you becomes pretty damn important.

Curiously though it doesn't seem to help bosses much at all.

Also special mention for getting to the Sanctuary for the Keepers of Fire & Sky. That shit nearly broke my trigger finger. And ffffuuuuucccccccckkkkkk Spindlebeasts, seriously, and their unblockable, unstaggerable with a 2-hander, 100% armor penetrating "Grab" attack.

That is probably another complaint I would make against this game. It really abuses the enemy grab attacks, none of which can be blocked or parried afaik and it feels like late game every single enemy has one. I parried a Stick knight and apparently that breaks his stick and the first thing he does is pounce you with the jagged end of it. And the way enemies execute animations, sometimes you'll be too close and they'll just bust out one of these attacks in a microsecond, and suddenly you're down 40% to 90% of your life. And then you stack two guys just spamming grab attacks one on top of another like the Spindlebeasts or Daemons or Spiders or Dogs.....and suddenly regular ass enemies effectively start one shotting you regardless of how much armor or health you have. For a while I thought you could pretty much block and parry your way through this game, but in some ways the late game shifts to needing to always first strike your enemy before they can start doing any of their bullshit. That can start to get a little aggravating.

Questions: Does anyone know how Health or Fatigue/Focus are derived? As far as I can tell, no stats affect their growth. It's also unclear if Fatigue = Focus or not.

[BlackFlyme]

Your level determines how much Health you have. I think your Focus depends on your Willpower, which is used for Stamina as well. Not sure if any stats affect Fatigue.

And Fuck Spindlebeasts. Massive pain in the ass to time the dodge, and the grab pretty much insta-kills. If by some miracle you survive, they will likely grab you again before your ass is even beginning to start the standing animation, let alone allow you to roll out of the way.

And some of the platforming. Like the F&S Sanctuary.

[nenjin]

Yeah but there's no way to increase how much you get per level like in Dark Souls is there? It'd explain why the game has been getting progressively tougher for me, if my survivability is really not increasing in any meaningful way except on static level ups. If Armor is the only thing that makes me tougher than a caster, when you neutralize armor as a factor....yeah. That'd explain a lot about how I've been feeling lately.

I wonder if HP per level is different per classes.

And the more I think about it, the more armor seems to be kind of a trap. It takes a shit load of Augmented Endurance to increase your weight capacity, and wield 2 handed weapons 1 handed. But you're not getting the kind of benefits you would from strength, dex, willpower, wisdom or magic.

[Cthulhu]

Man, this game isn't even pretending to not be Dark Souls.  Not a copy, but actually Dark Souls.  It was kind of neat for a few minutes, but I don't like the art style (i'd somehow convinced myself it was gonna be one of those kind of muddy pixelated games) and I have to agree with RPS that with a game that's /this/ Dark Souls, the question is why not just play dark souls?

[nenjin]

Man, this game isn't even pretending to not be Dark Souls.  Not a copy, but actually Dark Souls.  It was kind of neat for a few minutes, but I don't like the art style (i'd somehow convinced myself it was gonna be one of those kind of muddy pixelated games) and I have to agree with RPS that with a game that's /this/ Dark Souls, the question is why not just play dark souls?

Lower barrier to entry, I'd say. I have a friend at work who bought it and is really enjoying it and I said "I didn't take you for a Dark Souls guy Brian."

He replied that he owns Dark Souls, he's just not that gud at it, so this is nice median level of challenge for him. I can understand that. Figuring out fight mechanics in 2d is easier than 3d. Upgrading gear and making character decisions is way more straightforward in S&S than in Dark Souls. There's 4 player local coop, and no invasions or pvp or online anything to worry about. "Covenants" are way more straightforward in S&S. They're easier to find (mostly) and join, although S&S has consequences for switching covenants that DS does not. There's platforming and platforming puzzle solving in S&S, which Dark Souls basically has none of (thank god.) Rarely have I had to spend more than a few hours on any particular area and boss, versus Dark Souls one area could take you a long time to clear out, without using spoilers.

It's more or less Dark Souls-lite, although that's not an entirely fair depiction either. I think there's enough going on in S&S that is different from Dark Souls, or is at least a satisfying genre blending, that it's worth playing on its own. YMMV depending on how you react to the art style. I'd disagree that it's a pixel-y mess. At 1920 x 1080 it is pretty crisp for me, although the lighting effects is what gives it the muddied look. I'm not a fan of the character designs but I find the world art and monsters evocative enough to be interesting. If this game didn't have the....doll-like aesthetic I guess I'd call it, it'd be 100% in tune with what I like.

Plus, I really love Castlevania Symphony of the Night and this game evokes that nostalgia very strongly.

I also think S&S feels like it has slightly more visceral combat than Dark Souls. Both games will get your heart rate up and their combats are very in the moment, all engrossing. But I dunno, I feel the hits more in S&S when dealing them and receiving them than in Dark Souls, because S&S has more sexy visual and audio window dressing for combat. The screen shake, that nice bass-y boom for power hits, the sound of bones cracking, blood sprays on the walls, sending dudes flying across the screen, limbs and heads coming off.....I wanted a lot of this stuff for Dark Souls but it never got them, always keeping combat feeling and looking very clinical. Dark Soul's combat is satisfying from a skill and challenge perspective, just not so much aesthetically. Most of the time S&S is slightly less satisfying from a skill and challenge and tactical perspective due to the limitations of 2d....but is more aesthetically satisfying.

I'm billing this game to friends and family as a way to see what Dark Souls is about, without throwing yourself in the deep end of it. And for those who loved SotN and Dark Souls, it's the marriage of a gameplay format and a set of gameplay mechanics and assumptions that work very well together.

[Cthulhu]

Decided to give it another shot.  Part of the problem is this sodden knight is a fucking scumbag, who "changes up his tactics" when you've almost beat him and by "changes up his tactics" I mean "stops having any openings"

[nenjin]

Yeah. It's a theme with most bosses. At 50% life they start adding new combos to their attacks, possibly at 25% too. FWIW, once you beat Sodden Knight there's several easy bosses, and most bosses have safe zones in their attacks you find.

For Sodden Knight in particular you gotta watch that jump slash, because once he gets low enough he does a return stroke immediately after. I block the jump attack, roll through him and then attack him in the back.

Same thing with his lightning attack along the ground. At 25 or 50%, he'll do a leap slash immediately after it to try and catch you jumping.

[nenjin]

42 hours, give or take, and I'm at the final boss fight. I think. All bosses in the game down as far as the wiki goes. Not bad for $18 dollars. A friend of mine beat it in 30. I spent a lot of the time in the beginning exploring without a wiki.

Not sure what I want to try next. I'm thinking Mage since there's basically all the "Magic" spells I've not used and dealing with ranged attack controls in this game seems like a next level challenge. I may fool around with NG+ a bit eventually. Does it really add anything, or is it just there to feed your salt addiction? I know there's two endings.