Salt and Sanctuary

[Sigfried1977]

Cannot wait for Dark Souls 3 to finally come out? Why not try out Salt and Sanctuary, the independent gem by the husband-and-wife indie joint that is SKA studios (the Dishwasher) instead. It's an incredible love letter to both From Soft's ever expanding series of world class action rpgs and the now pretty much dead Metroidvania genre of games. It's beautiful, challenging, deep and surprisingly massive. Just about everything you'd expect from a DS game has made a successful jump to 2d. You got your fast and heavy attacks, your jumping overheads, weapon stances, your shields, your magic schools, your parries, and even your Bloodborne firearms. There's an equivalent to DS's covenants in there as well, and should you commit a crime, you can even find an NPC who'll absolve you of your sins. You also get your hidden areas and optional boss fights of course.
I've sunken well over 15 hours into my initial playthrough at this point, and I'm already looking forward to consecutive new game+ runs as well as starting from scratch using different character builds. Quite frankly, this is GotY material as far as I'm concerned. A wonderful reprieve form the seemingly endless barrage of barely interactive looking-at-pretty-shit kinda games as well as the rogue-likes (or rogue-lites ot whatever) which have become the face of indie idevelopment.

 

[Cjail]

Hey I was curios about this one too.
I will consider it.

 

[Sigfried1977]

You should
I'm now 25 hours in, by the way. Really a much, much meatier experience than I expected. I have a handful of small complaints but all in all it's really not a massive deal. One would be about mapless navigation being a hell of a lot more confusing in a sidescrolling maze than in a comparable 3d game. No spectacular vistas to tell the player whether he's on the right track or not. Did Super Metroid have a map? Cannot remember whether it did. In any case, the gameworld in S & S is a many times more expansive. A little too expansive for mapless navigation maybe. My second complaint is about the bosses. They've been ramping up in complexity and difficulty as one would expect and hope for as a DS fan. That is until I've passed a certain threshold and that kinda thing basically stopped happening. I expect this has everything to do with the fact that you have a lot of freedom in choosing (or stumbling upon) the challenges you want to tackle at any given time. It's a game you can sequence-break the hell out of by design, and that also means butting heads with bosses that are a bit out of your leagure early on, while mopping the floor with others you simply didn't encounter until way later.