About 3-4 hours in and I'm not really sure how to feel about this. Salt & Sanctuary, while I had issues with was still a very competent metroidvania souls-like whatever you want to call it and followed a textbook approach to a souls-like world, enemy, level, and boss design. It worked and it was perfectly fine. This game though is significantly different. Salt and Sacrifice is instead structured by levels, where you have a hub and you select a level to go explore and do souls like things. The levels are not interconnected by any means other than selecting it from a menu. Thats OK I guess but I'm not really a fan of it personally. The other thing to note is that this game has two boss types. You have your traditional bosses you find progressing through a level and then you have the "Mages". Mages are best described as "Hunts", where you find an object to interact with in a level to start the hunt. The Mage boss will spawn somewhere on the level and spawn enemies unique to its type. It will then roam the level whilst you chase it, kill its enemies, and eventually you'll fight it in a traditional boss manner. It will drop a bunch of mats when you defeat it which you can then use to craft armor, weapons, acc's or items back at the hub. That... certainly sounds familiar doesn't it? Once you kill a Mage, you can no longer activate its hunt again, but instead they will have a chance to spawn somewhere in the level at random and you once again have to chase it down. I'm really not a fan of this. It feels like somewhere down the line the game had to go some serious overhaul for some reason and add a mechanic completely unrelated to that of traditional metroidvania souls-like and turn it into some sort of hybrid that doesn't do anything exceptionally well. Mages fall apart with more than one person fighting it so it has none of the exciting appeal of a monster hunter fight (whereas solo it will just continuously run away spawning enemies until you get it to half health where it will become a traditional boss fight albeit already almost dead) and the level based structure makes everything feel disconnected and unrelated in the context of the world and lore.

I will continue playing it but I don't really see myself finishing this. If this sounds like your jam or the ideas sound interesting it definitely doesn't hurt to try it out, especially since their first game is still solid by itself. It really feels like Salt and Sacrifice is trying to stand out by just combining two separate ideas without really considering how it would work out in the end. My guess is the developers did this due to games like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous having been released since their first game, two very popular games which in the eyes of many have more or less become the shining example of a good metroidvania and 2d souls-like respectively. Just my tinfoil hat theory but nonetheless, its a bit disappointing.