Salt and Sanctuary

There’s a particular kind of hubris in a tiny studio deciding it can do what FromSoftware does. In 2016, Ska Studios — essentially James Silva and Michelle Silva, the pair behind The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and Charlie Murder — did exactly that, and the result is still a strong argument that the Souls formula was never really about the third dimension.

Salt and Sanctuary, released May 17, 2016, is a hand-drawn 2D action RPG built on a side-scrolling plane. You wash up on a cursed island after a shipwreck, pick a class and a creed, and start dying. The vocabulary will be instantly legible to anyone who has held a bonfire: stamina-gated combat, a currency that doubles as experience and evaporates on death until you retrieve it, checkpoints that function as social and economic hubs, and a world that turns out to be one continuous, viciously interlocked object rather than a corridor of levels.

What makes it more than tribute is the compression. Removing an axis should have gutted the combat — no circle-strafing, no camera to fight, no lock-on tension. Instead it concentrated everything into spacing and timing on a single line, which is arguably where the genre’s best moments always lived anyway. Ska also grafted on genuine metroidvania architecture: traversal upgrades that retroactively rewrite earlier zones, shortcuts that snap the map shut with an audible click.

Market position is strong. It holds an 84 on Metacritic, and it arrived before the “Souls-like” label calcified into a marketing checkbox. It remains among the genre’s most confident 2D entries, even after Ska’s own divisive follow-up, Salt and Sacrifice. It lists at $17.99, and very few games in this space offer this much for that.

• Stamina-Driven 2D Combat: Light and heavy attacks, parries, rolls, backstabs and two-handed swings, with every weapon class carrying a distinct move set. A greathammer isn’t a slower sword; it’s a different physics problem.
• The Salt Economy: Slain enemies drop salt, which serves as both currency and experience. Die and you drop it all — your killer absorbs it and glows until you kill them again. One resource, two competing uses, permanent tension.
• Constellation Skill Tree: A sprawling node grid closer to Path of Exile than to a class menu. Builds emerge from pathing decisions rather than from a dropdown, and respec items exist but are scarce enough to make choices sting.
• Creed-Based Sanctuaries: Bonfires replaced by claimable shrines. Dedicate a sanctuary to a creed and you install its vendors, blacksmiths and mages — betray one and the world reacts. Progression systems with a political dimension.
• 600+ Craftable Items: Weapons, armor, spells and consumables, all upgradeable through a materials economy that rewards exploration over grinding.
• Local Drop-In Co-Op: A second player joins on the couch, instantly. In a genre obsessed with asynchronous, connection-gated multiplayer, this is a genuine rarity.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is familiar and ruthlessly effective: push into unknown territory, bank progress at a sanctuary, spend salt before it can be lost, push further. What Salt and Sanctuary understands — and what most imitators miss — is that the loop only works if the walk back is dangerous. Ska Studios refuses to make traversal safe. Every re-run through a cleared corridor still carries a live threat, because enemy placement is designed around fatigue and impatience rather than around fairness.

Flattening the combat to one axis does something interesting to the risk calculus. In 3D Souls games, panic has an escape hatch — you can always run past, circle wide, break line of sight. Here, an enemy in front of you is a wall. Your options are to kill it, parry it, roll through it, or retreat, and retreating usually means giving back ground you paid for. The result is a game with far less slop in it. Every encounter resolves into a legible timing question, which makes both the wins and the deaths feel authored rather than accidental.

The weapon movesets carry more of the design load than the skill tree does. Swapping from a halberd to twin daggers isn’t a stat change, it’s a re-learning of your character’s spacing envelope. Heavy weapons commit you to animations long enough to be genuinely frightening; light weapons demand you win the same fight with three times as many correct inputs. Magic and ranged builds work, though they lean on resource management that the UI does a poor job of surfacing mid-fight.

Progression and the Skill Tree

The constellation tree is the game’s most ambitious system and its most double-edged. Spread across hundreds of nodes, it lets you organically drift from a strength build into a hybrid caster over a long campaign without ever formally “multiclassing.” That’s elegant. It’s also intimidating in a way the game does nothing to soften — there’s no onboarding, no recommended path, no indication of which branches lead somewhere useful. It’s easy to sink long stretches into a character that can’t equip anything you want to use.

That reads as intentional. The genre trades in opacity. But there’s a difference between withholding information and presenting it badly, and the tree crosses that line more often than it should.

The Map

This is where the game earns its reputation. The island is a single interlocked structure — drowned keeps, poison bogs, corrupted cathedrals, mountaintop ruins — and the connections between zones are the real content. Traversal upgrades retroactively unlock geography you walked past hours earlier, and the moment when a ladder drops and you realize you’ve been circling one location the whole time is among the best the genre offers.

The flaw is the absence of a meaningful fast-travel network. Late-game backtracking across multiple cleared zones is a tax that stops being tense and starts being tedious. Once you’ve mastered a region, walking it again is just walking.

Difficulty Curve

The first two-thirds are excellent — hard, legible, learnable. The last third is where the seams show. Difficulty spikes unevenly and increasingly leans on enemy swarms rather than encounter design. Fighting three fast enemies at once on a 2D plane isn’t a harder version of the same skill test; it’s a different, worse test, because your positional options collapse. It’s the one place where the flattened axis costs the game something.

The hand-drawn art is the most polarizing thing here, and the criticism is fair. Silva’s style — chunky, exaggerated, cartoonish in a way that sits oddly against the material — reads beautifully in silhouette-heavy areas and turns into visual soup in dark ones. Enemy telegraphs can disappear into the background, which in a parry-timing game is not a cosmetic complaint. Display brightness settings matter more here than in most games.

When it works, it really works. The oppressive, washed-out melancholy of the island is achieved with almost no technical budget, and the boss designs — the Sodden Knight, the Tree of Men — land with a weight that outpaces their polygon-free construction.

The UI is the weakest craft in the game. Inventory management across 600+ items is handled with menus that appear to have been designed for a much smaller game and then never revisited. Comparing gear requires more clicks than it should. Sorting is rudimentary. It’s the kind of friction that a third programmer would have fixed, and there wasn’t one.

As for performance: a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and that’s part of its appeal.

Steam is the definitive version. Uncapped framerate, full resolution, and — critically — brightness and display settings you can actually tune to fight the readability problem. Controller is strongly recommended; the game was built around analog-free directional input and mouse-and-keyboard is functional but joyless. Modding and community configuration are a modest bonus.

Nintendo Switch is the more interesting proposition and the one we’d recommend to most people. The game’s structure — dense, bite-sized encounters between checkpoints — suits portable play better than any 3D Souls game ever will. Short handheld sessions are real sessions here. The tradeoff is that busier late-game fights are precisely where a portable build has the least headroom — not disqualifying, but on a stamina-timing game, not free either. The handheld screen also worsens the dark-area legibility issue; docked play is noticeably clearer.

Local co-op works identically on both, but the Switch’s two-Joy-Con setup makes it effectively frictionless. That’s a genuine selling point.

Nearly a decade on, Salt and Sanctuary has outlived most of the games that copied it, and the reason isn’t nostalgia. Two people built a world with real architecture, a combat system with real teeth, and a progression tree deep enough to argue about — and then priced it like a weekend indie. The art will divide you, the menus will annoy you, and the last stretch tests your patience more than your skill. None of that changes the fact that this remains a high-water mark for 2D Souls-likes, and everything since has been measured against it.

Buy it on Switch if you want to play it in bed. Buy it on Steam if you want to see it properly. Buy it either way.