Salt and Sanctuary
84
★ /10
Nintendo Switch, 
PC, 
PS Vita, 
PS4, 
Xbox One
Where to buy
Salt and Sanctuary is a 2016 action RPG developed and published by Ska Studios — the husband-and-wife team of James and Michelle Silva — released March 15, 2016 for PlayStation 4 and PC, with Vita, Switch, and Xbox versions following. It holds Metacritic scores in the low-to-mid 80s, sold well past a million copies, and owns a specific historical title: the first game to translate Dark Souls into 2D wholesale — stats, builds, estus-like flasks, corpse runs, covenants-as-creeds, interconnected shortcuts, the lot — and still the reference point every “2D Souls” conversation starts from.
A shipwrecked sailor washes onto a cursed island to rescue a princess; what follows is a drowned, charcoal-sketched nightmare of drowned knights, mad alchemists, and twenty-plus bosses, structured exactly like the games it honors.
Technical Specifications
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Developer | Ska Studios (James & Michelle Silva) |
| Publisher | Ska Studios |
| Release | March 15, 2016 (PS4, PC); Vita, Switch, Xbox later |
| Metacritic | Low-to-mid 80s (by platform) |
| Sales | 1+ million copies |
| Sequel | Salt and Sacrifice (2022) |
| Genre | Action RPG, Soulslike, Metroidvania |
| Mode(s) | Single-player · Local co-op |
The Tree of Skill
The signature system is a sprawling, Path of Exile-style skill web replacing simple leveling — hundreds of nodes steering builds from greatswords to whips to pyromancy — layered over sanctuaries (bonfires with a twist: players furnish them with NPCs, choosing which vendors and services each shrine offers) and creed allegiances standing in for covenants. Salt is souls; losing it to the enemy that killed you, then hunting that enemy down, adds a personal-grudge loop even FromSoftware never used.
Reception and Legacy
Critics called it brutal, fair, and shockingly complete for two people — “a souls-like Metroidvania, and a very good one at that” ran the representative verdict — with the hand-drawn art’s murky style the main taste divider. A decade on, the recurring r/fromsoftware threads asking what Souls fans make of it still converge on the same answer: essential, and never quite matched — including, by wide community consensus, by its own sequel.
Where to Play It Today
Salt and Sanctuary is on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, almost permanently discounted under $10, with local co-op intact — still the first recommendation in its subgenre, ahead of games made by teams fifty times its size.
