Video Game / Salt and Sanctuary

The only Soulslike where dying makes you less salty!

"Envy is such a thing.
A man envies his neighbor, whose wife is very beautiful.
A lord envies a king, who commands nobles.
A king envies a god, to whom all men must bow.
And a god envies... a god envies what a god cannot have."

—The Old Man

Salt and Sanctuary is a Souls-like RPG made by Ska Studios, the creators of The Dishwasher series and Charlie Murder. The game takes cues from FromSoftware's Dark Souls trilogy, Demon's Souls, and Bloodborne; you have a stamina bar, which depletes as you perform attacks, sanctuaries act as your bonfires, dying has you drop your salt which enemies can pick up to become stronger. It also takes a lot of cues from the Castlevania series — not only is there a lot of platforming involved — you get mobility upgrades that allow you to reach new areas and go through previously unavailable paths in revisited ones.

The world has been at war for centuries. But at last, a tentative means of peace: a political marriage. You are the crew member of a ship, charged with transporting your princess to her suitor. Unfortunately, it all falls to shambles as a freak storm rises and assassins strike down the crew. Death is not the end, however, as you awaken shipwrecked on an uncharted island. In fog-shrouded valleys, where grinning, mossy corpses cling to rusted arms, shambling figures begin to stir. Beneath crumbling, salt-worn structures, labyrinthine passageways lead to unspeakable evil, long forgotten by man. You only have two objectives: find the princess and escape.

It was initially released for the PS4 on March 15, 2016. The Steam version was released on May 18, 2016 and the PS Vita port on March 28, 2017. The game was later ported to the Nintendo Switch on August 2, 2018.

A sequel title, Salt and Sacrifice, was released for the PS4 and Playstation 5 in May 2022.

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The game provides examples of:

• Ability Required to Proceed: You gain several "brands" that open up new paths ranging from wall-jumping to reversing gravity.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is currently believed to be around 500, but may potentially be higher than that, given that certain nodes on the skill tree can be upgraded more than the indicated three times. But in your first playthrough, a Level 80 character with the right stats and equipment can sufficiently clear the game.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: As stated in its description, the Schrarfichter has a finely honed edge so sharp that the very fabric of space seems to part before it.
• Action Survivor: As per the genre — you're some schmuck who gets washed ashore on an island full of monstrosities, so you have to become one of these. It's especially true for the Pauper and even moreso for the Chef — while other classes at least start with weapons (even the Pauper has an axe), the Chef only gets a frying pan and some potatoes. The only notable subversions to the trope are the knight class, who has heavy armor and a sword, and the paladin, who has even better armor and a mace.
• Airborne Mook: There are plenty of flying enemies, and they can be quite a menace without a long-reaching weapon or some means of ranged combat.
• The Alcatraz: The Red Hall of Cages, but the torturers and prisoners are no longer distinguishable from one another.
• Alliterative Title
• All There in the Manual: A lot of subtle plot elements can be discovered through text descriptions and bestiary entries.
• Amazing Technicolor Population:
  • Characters hailing from Gulchmire have green skin, black sclera, and scales instead of eyebrows.
  • Characters from Jinderen have charcoal skin, red sclera, and small tusks.
• Ambiguously Brown: Player characters from Markdor, Taenibir, or Liven have notably darker skin than the other origin countries.
• Ambiguously Human: There's something very off about the Tristini. They have pale skin, Creepy Shadowed Undereyes, and an elongated jaw that appears to give them a permanent Cheshire Cat Grin, but their nature is otherwise left up in the air.
• Anachronism Stew: In-Universe. The island seems to contain weapons, clothes, armor, architecture, and locations cut wholesale from all over the world and across multiple time periods, with a Ziggurat from a southern desert kingdom built on top of a temple from a northern kingdom. It's because everything on the island was made by the Nameless God based on the memories of those sacrificed to him.
• An Adventurer Is You: While two of the starting classes, the cook and the pauper, have poor equipment and no stat bonuses at the start, the other characters follow the standards for the trope. However, this is only the starting point, and like the Souls games, you are free to create your own character build.
  • The Knight, who wields a sword and shield while clad in plated mail armor.
  • The Paladin, who wields a mace and heavy shield while clad in mail armor.
  • The Hunter, who wields a crossbow and a whip.
  • The Cleric, who uses miracles.
  • The Wizard, who uses magic.
  • The Thief, who uses a dagger and comes with a large supply of items to use at the start, including poisoned daggers and bombs.
• And I Must Scream:
  • The Nameless God's real body is the crucified "scarecrow" you encounter across the island. While his powers are immense, so much so that he can kill and replace other gods, his true body is still hanging there, unable to move. The description of the Blade of Envy transmuted from his ashes confirms that his existence was a miserable one, and killing him may have granted him peace at last. If you choose the Domination Ending, then this will be your fate, too.
  • Implied to be the fate of the Split Swordsmen — they were involved in a botched teleportation that has "left most of their bodies in the void". When they're not erratically shaking while wearing specially made armor, they're using this to Teleport Spam you with drop attacks.
  • Also seems to be the fate of The Third Lamb. While the first two Lambs, respectively the Congregation and the Lady of the Dome, were sacrificed by the Untouched Inquisitor and seemingly have died, the Third Lamb, despite having been "sacrificed" as well, is very much alive. The nature of the ominous sacrifice is never explained, but the Lamb in its current shape is described as "the bound and broken thrall of the Untouched Inquisitor", and it is said that she "was made to sacrifice her will in service of the Inquisitor", along with "pride, the praise of her master, and a name". The general picture seems downright terrifying and makes killing the boss look like an act of mercy.
  • From various descriptions around the area, it would seem Hager's Cavern wasn't a hideout for the titular Dread Pirate, but a prison designed to torment him at every turn. The skeletons and Armor Mites may have arrived there later, but the witch in charge put several vicious wraiths as both wardens and torturers for Hager, specifically made to be "eternal wardens to his suffering". The description for his crafted Cutlass mentions that A Fate Worse Than Death may be often mentioned, but Hager's sorry state and the similarly warped blade's own state prove it true. Of course, when you find Hager himself, he turns out to be nothing but a hollowed-out husk controlled like a puppet by some tiny doll-like being. Which makes one think the pirate himself is still alive in that mangled, cored, putrid state, with absolutely no control of what he does and forced to watch some little parasite use his body for its own purposes. Whoever that witch was, she was clearly not messing around.
  • Implied to be the fate of every God ever because of the Nameless God, it somehow traps gods in the Crypt of the Dead Gods, redirecting their prayers to itself, slowly starving the trapped Gods to death, which is implied to be a very, very slow process, that's if it even kills them, due to their candlelit souls being immortal.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: The Domination ending. After spending the whole game slaying the creations of the Nameless God and killing the fiend yourself, you become the new Nameless God of the island. To emphasize this, you're depicted wearing his armor after taking the Scarecrow's helm.
• Animated Armor: Crypt Keepers and Alkymancery Knights are noted to be this in various flavour text snippets, and their constituent body parts can be worn as actual armor once you find the respective sets; they're usually hellishly heavy, though.
• Antidote Effect: Averted. The Mend and Cleanse prayers requre significant investment in the skill tree to even equip, and also require you to Focus, depleting your maximum stamina. Therefore, your healing potions and antidotes never become obsolete. Furthermore, you can trade certain items to a Leader to get more basic healing potions, or an upgraded one that also cures poisoning.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you fail a Descration attempt at a Sanctuary, a Saltbat will spawn in there even if you were killed by one of the Sanctuary Guardians. Likewise there is a 5-second timer before you are locked inside the hostile Sanctuary, giving you a somewhat limited opportunity to recover your lost Salt and exit without worries.
  • If you die to a boss, you don't need to kill the boss on your next attempt to reclaim your stolen Salt. You just need to do enough damage to the boss and you'll get it back automatically.
• Arrows on Fire: The archers in the Red Hall of Cages can fire these at you.
• Artificial Brilliance: When you are high-leveled, some enemies may try to retreat instead of outright attacking you on sight. In most cases where they do this, you'll later learn that they are actually trying to lure you into an area which have more enemies for you to deal with. The Arrox to the left of the Sanctuary in the Ziggurat of Dust is notorious for this tactic, running to the left area where three Lietches are waiting for their chance to ambush you in the dark.
• Artificial Stupidity: The enemies can walk right into traps, and some with a pouncing attack may even jump to their deaths when near ledges or Bottomless Pits.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: Much like the last dungeon of Dark Souls, the Nameless God's castle is one, for having no lesser mooks, and a dark, greyscale color scheme.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • While the Northern Cross Greatscissor averts this in gameplay, since its scaling in Strength and Magic makes it a viable weapon for a Magic Knight build, it plays it straight in its backstory description. Its inventor was jealous of the rival nation's Jaws of Death and wanted to create a superior weapon. While the Northern Cross was indeed recognized as the superior weapon, it was also made with rare materials, meaning it could not be mass-produced, unlike the Jaws of Death.
  • Also in-universe for the Axe of Splendor, which is noted to be extremely heavy and was never intended for use in combat. Subverted in that the right build can make it extremely practical due to its speed and reach... assuming you can afford it in the first place.
• Backtracking: Of course, it's a Metrodvania game employing the Ability Required to Proceed mechanic.
  • You will be able to gain access to previously-unreachable areas once you return with the necessary Brand(s). This would then allow you to enter new or optional dungeons as well as obtain rare items.
  • If you try to proceed straight towards the entrance of the Castle of Storms via Bandit's Pass without the Vertigo Brand, an Old Man will appear by the gates telling you to go back as you are unable to cross the gap yet. At this point, you actually need to go to the Village of Smiles by backtracking a bit, and descending a series of platforms in the Bandit's Pass.
• BFS: The game's exaggerated art style means that just about every great sword (and great hammer and great axe, for that matter), will be ridiculously large, often longer than the Player Character's height. The game doesn't always acknowledge their ridiculous size, either, making it seem like hauling around a blade you could pole vault with is a normal thing to do.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The war between Askaria and Tristin is either this or outright Evil Versus Evil since neither side can be even considered remotely good. The former is a warmongering expansionist empire that's been warring with its neighbors and persecuting adherents of other creeds in order to make the Three the dominant religion (and is in effect unknowingly doing the bidding of the Nameless God). If the Red Hall of Cages is anything to go by, the country is also no stranger to committing torture on a massive scale. Meanwhile, Tristin's history is rife with its own fair share of atrocities, subjecting elemental mages to genocide^note though that one might be understandable in light of the sequel, and being home to the Order of the Betrayer.
• Black Market: According to its Flavor Text, Red Shards are sold in one of these by merchants of The Three.
• Blackout Basement: Certain areas are completely pitch-black, prompting you to use a torch (at the cost of using your weapon one-handed), equip a lantern charm, or cast a spell.
• Bladder of Steel: Like Dark Souls, the game doesn't have a real pause button. You can open your inventory and check the bestiary, but everyone else is free to kill you while you do it.
• Blob Monster: The Poisonous Cytoplasms that you can encounter in The Watching Woods. They're semi-transparent, and have a habit of dropping out of trees directly onto the player's head.
• Blood Magic: The Order of the Betrayer's specialty. The Blood Spells offered by the Order of the Betrayer are powerful, but also debuff your character after each use. The Betrayer craves bloodshed, so his gifts require that his followers shed some of their own blood to spill the blood of others. Their Creed items are also made out of processed blood:
  • The Blood Vial contains magically treated human blood that heals the injuries of those who drink it, as well as corrupting them a little.
  • The Flask of Defilement is made up of tainted blood which lowers the resistances of those doused in it. Anyone who is affected by this is visibly dripping with black blood for its duration.
• Boring, but Practical: The Kureimoa's plainness and usefulness is even noted in its description. It's got decent damage for an early game weapon and excellent Strength scaling, making it a perfectly good weapon for a Greatsword wielding character build for most of the game.
• Boss-Only Level: The Siam Lake and the Still Palace only contain the Witch of the Lake and The Nameless God respectively.
• Bottomless Pits: If you try jumping at the lowest points of an outdoor dungeon, you may sometimes be treated with a Game Over screen even before your character hits the ground.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Present in the Iron Pot's description.
  A cast-iron pot used for reducing stocks, simmering stews and, in a pinch, cracking skulls.
• Breath Weapon: The Kraekan Wyrm can breathe fire, while Skourzh and The Third Lamb breathe lightning bolts.
• Broken Angel:
  • The Third Lamb. Its bestiary entry reveals that it was once a noble beast who had the praise of her master, her pride, and a name. The Untouched Inquisitor saw sin in those and made them sacrifices, just like the Third Lamb herself. The trope description "Now imagine someone took a sledgehammer to that marvel and left it bleeding and broken on the floor." may have been quite literal in this case, judging by the way the boss moves during the fight.
  • The Three. It doesn't get much worse than gods being reduced to rotting undead corpses.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Pitchwoods, especially if you want to get everything and join the Fire and Sky Creed. It's a challenging platforming section, in stark contrast to most of the other areas in the game. Dying of fall damage is highly probable here. Furthermore, the first part of the area is home to the Spindlebeasts — these things will almost certainly kill you with one hit if you don't kill them first (which thankfully isn't too hard since they have low health). Oddly enough, the boss of the area isn't too bad in comparison, especially if you have a reliable means of dealing fire damage.
• Cain and Abel: Azredak and Devara, respectively. Devara is the patron goddess of the Devara's Light creed, and upholds the virtues of kindness, humility, and forgiveness. Her brother, Azredak, leads the Order of the Betrayer, which calls for murdering indiscriminately and spreading malice across the world. And fittingly, Azredak intends to one day murder Devara.
• Character Customization:
  • At the start of the game, you can choose what your character looks like without wearing any helmets nor armor.
  • With the massive possibilities in the Skill Tree, you can customize your characters' build and weapon specialties.
• Chef of Iron: One of the starting classes is in fact the ship's chef, whose starting weapon is even a Frying Pan of Doom. While it's a bit of Joke Character, there's nothing stopping him from slaughtering the invading marauders on his boat, making calamari of the Kraekan on the deck, and slaying multiple gods on the island.
• Chest Monster: The Mimku. It's a big squid-like Kraekan with a ravenous appetite and the ability to disguise itself as anything. And they've learned that the surest way to get a meal is to take the form of a treasure chest.
• Combo: Slash, stab to get you airborne, and stab to Ground Pound or slash to throw the enemy away.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Enemies don't fall when they step on fragile wooden platforms. Said platforms would only crumble when you step on them. You can use this tactic to your advantage though; step on a wooden platform with an enemy on top, you can watch the poor creature fall to its death.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: The game has two-player co-op right off the bat. However, it has a few problems: it's local couch co-op only and because the co-op mode was a late addition, the game isn't balanced for the feature and there was very little to no QA testing for it, which means that there's a number of game-breaking progression bugs should you play co-op. At least there is a workaround in order to play co-op online: you need to use the PS4 Shareplay feature.
• Continuing is Painful: Dying causes you to lose all of your salt, and 10% of your gold. You can get your salt back if you killed the enemy that killed you, but that monster will be powered up significantly. Mercifully, if it's a boss, you don't need to kill it to get your salt back, just deplete 1/4 of its health bar. If you died from an environmental hazard or fell down a Bottomless Pit, then your salt will become a Saltbat enemy that must be killed.
• Convenient Weakness Placement:
  • The Queen of Smiles is weak to holy damage, and three Blessed Pages are found right before her boss room.
  • Slightly less convenient is the Sodden Knight's weakness of Birian Firepots to the back (his cape is apparently very flammable), since you can buy them for 100 gold each right at the first Sanctuary... unless you picked Devara's Light as your starting creed, in which case you're out of luck as your merchant will sell Lightvessels instead.
• Counter-Attack: The parrying mechanic. With a well-timed press of the attack button when blocking with a shield or buckler, you can stagger minor humanoid mooks, making them open for a painful counter attack.
• Crapsack World: It goes without saying, Dark Souls inspirations and all. The known world has been embroiled in wars of any and all kinds for centuries, from religious crusades to witch hunts to wars of royal succession. Then you've got the Kraekan and all the shit on the island. You eventually find out that the Nameless God is the one behind everything (other than the Kraekan), who manipulates every creed out there into constant war for the sake of sacrifices and sating his sheer hatred of gods and their followers.
• Critical Status Buff: The Redhair Charm greatly increases attack power when the wielder is near death.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • Attacks from large enemies will almost certainly send you flying and knock you on your ass. They have a habit of perfectly timing their next attack to hit you just as you pick yourself up, in the split second between your Mercy Invincibility wearing off and you regaining control of your character, sending you flying again. And again.
  • Being trapped between two smaller enemies that can attack very quickly (such as Drowned Soldiers or Retchfeeders) can leave you trapped as a tennis ball for a while.
  • Speaking of Retchfeeders, like the large enemies mentioned above, they have a habit of timing their pouncing attacks so that Retchfeeder B will get you with his pounce the second Retchfeeder A is done chewing on your face. This also applies to any other enemy with a pouncing attack.
• Dead Guy on Display:
  • You can find hanging corpses of adventurers being displayed at certain spots of outdoor dungeons. Although in some cases like the arena of the Kraken Cyclops, one can see decapitated heads impaled on spiikes. It turns out these are the characters of other players who have recently died in that area. However, this feature can only be seen if you are playing the game online.
  • Subverted for the Impaled Knights in the Pitchwoods. One can easily think that these impaled corpses are already dead, but they are pretty much reanimated and will jump towards you should you get near them.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Everything is greyscale within the Still Palace, including the battle against the final boss.
• Dem Bones: Mostly present in Hager's Cavern as Angsty Bones, Hunting Bones and Primitive Bones. Unlike the common drowned/rotten enemies, they can actually teleport around by changing in a swirl of bones.
• Determinator: The Player Character. After being washed up on an island that follows its own rules and populated with undead and Kraekan, they battle their way to its heart, first to find the missing princess and then to put an end to an evil god. Likely dying and suffering many times in the process.
• Developer's Foresight: The Whisperman and Whisperlady will be invisible in their bestiary entries unless you drink a Phial of Undersight.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: You kill the lord of the island who's known only as the Nameless God. You can also slay the Three, though they're in a considerably weakened state by the time you find them. Skourzh could also count; his dominion over the sea makes him an especially powerful and god-like Kraekan.
• Die, Chair, Die!:
  • There are several barrels scattered around as decorations in the environment, yet a single strike will destroy them, sometimes giving you a pittance of gold.
  • This also applies to the Mimkus disguised as chests, as you can distinguish an ordinary chest from a Mimku by attacking it. If the "chest" takes damage and transforms, then it's a case of the latter.
• Difficult, but Awesome: You can parry a lesser enemy's melee attacks by properly timing the attack button while blocking. Successful parries will stagger the enemy and leave them vulnerable for a massive damage, which can One-Hit Kill the weaker ones. But as the game presents you enemies that can attack faster and can execute combos, parrying becomes more difficult and you'll risk losing Stamina from prolonged blocking.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Every parameter is soft-capped at 50. Parameter levels before it would have noticeable whole-digit increments, while parameter levels post-50 would only provide minuscule increments which are mostly halved or merely by decimals.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The Shrouded Bulwark can be obtained very early, provided you start with the Amber Idol. In the early game, it is stronger than the Kureimoa it is transmuted from. However, the Kureimoa has much better Strength scaling, thus it can be more powerful in the late-game when you are higher-leveled. Note that there is only one Kureimoa to be found in the wild (near the Village of Smiles, which is the third level), and only followers of the Three or Iron Ones can buy them. All the other creeds are out of luck.
  • Choosing the Iron Ones creed at the start can also grant you early access to the Steel Centipede. Being a tier two whip, it's both usable by a fairly low level character and straight-forward to upgrade. However, what makes it powerful is that 1) it's one of the game's two sword whips, meaning it has the versatility of functioning as both a sword and a whip, and 2) its top tier Dexterity scaling means that (once upgraded a few times) it starts hitting harder than any other whip in the game. With some grinding, it can be obtained before you even fight your second boss, and a Dexterity-focused character will have no real need to replace/transmute it.
• Divine Intervention: The Sacred Linens Prayer is thought to invoke this trope in its description, stating that divine intervention is the only way to heal the most grievous wounds.
• Door to Before: It's very common to open a door and find out that it leads back to a place you previously explored in the early game.
• Downer Ending: Both endings. Either you can become the new god of the island, forever trapped and unable to escape, forced to keep the cycle of war going... Or you can escape, leaving you adrift in the middle of the ocean, the sole survivor of the wreck. Everyone else, including the princess, is dead, and there's little chance of you being rescued. But maybe, just maybe, the cycle has finally been broken.
• Dual Boss:
  • The Unskinned and the Architect are fought at the same time.
  • Since the Coveted cannot move on its own, the main danger comes from the two Coveting. Whichever is wielding the axe will approach and attack you with it, while the other fires off magical projectiles.
• Dual Wielding: The Crypt Keepers, titanic Animated Armors that they are, carry a ridiculously huge hammer in one hand, and a similarly gigantic axe in the other. You can craft them, too, but they are perhaps the heaviest weapons in the game, to the point that the game remarks just being able to lift one of the damn things is a more effective deterrent than the weapon itself.
• Dump Stat: Dexterity-centric builds are difficult to rely on as you would be forced to use short-ranged weapons that scale from that parameter. The range alone is problematic as you would lack the massive arc-hitting strikes or long-ranged magic spells that Strength-centric and Magic-centric weapons respectively provide. While you may be hitting fast with Dexterity weapons such as daggers, whips and spears, you'll have a hard time dealing with enemy swarms and those that are resistant to the Slash damage type, which almost every Dexterity weapon has in common, as well as the damage type that most enemies are resistant to.
• Ear Ache: Ears seem to be the go-to source for war trophies and alchemical transfusions in Salt and Sanctuary. Expect to amass a wide array of them over the course of your journey.
• Eaten Alive: If you interact with a chest-disguised Mimku by opening it like any other chest, the monster will transform and try to swallow your character whole. But despite the massive amount of damage, you can still survive them if you are levelled high enough.
• Edible Bludgeon: There are potatoes in this game, and they are used as throwable projectiles.
• Eldritch Abomination: Kraekan, a whole league of sea-linked creatures of variable shape and power who love to prey on the Saltborn and seem to be particularly aggressive and powerful around the island you're shipwrecked in. The lore also implies that these creatures aren't bound to just the island, but are everywhere.
• Eldritch Location: As you progress through the game, you'll encounter various locations that, according to several characters, should not be there at all, given that they are quite famous buildings that are most definitely not located on the island. This is because the Nameless God creates these duplicates of lost or ruined civilizations from the memories of those that wind up on the island. Given that the Kraekan, the Lovecraftian deep sea creatures that you encounter on occasion, are indicated by lore to be common throughout the world, it is possible that the entire world is like this.
• Elite Mook: The Bronze Knights in the earlier stages can be significant threats as they are fully armored (resist the Slash damage attribute), can deal a lot of damage in return, and can block your attacks.
• The Empire: Askaria, which is described as one of the dominant kingdoms in the world and constantly at war with other nations, and also the home of the religion of The Three. Though not outright said, it is strongly implied that Askaria is the country that sends the player's ship out in the introduction, ostensibly for a political marriage. The aggression of Askaria is also implied to be due to the influence of the Nameless God, pushing the followers of The Three to spread their religion so he can steal their prayers for himself.
• Engrish: An unexpected instance with the Kureimoa. The story behind it is somewhat amusing, as A German Spy reveals: when James named the weapon, he used the romanized katakana for Claymore as a joke, but AGS thought it was intentional and left it be when he was revising the equipment names and descriptions.
• Equipment Upgrade: There are two mechanics that allow the player to strengthen their weapons and armor. Both require rare crafting materials and specified amounts of Salt.
  • The typical Upgrade, which can be requested from Blacksmiths, increases all of the item's stats. This process can be performed for a maximum of seven times per item.
  • Transmutation, which can be performed by Alchemists, allow you to convert an equipment into another within the same type (or into some unique types like Greatscissors). This trope can also be inverted since you can downgrade any weapon. For example, you can Transmute a Tier 5 Greatsword into a Tier 4 Greatsword or lower.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Everyone except the key NPCs that you can talk to in the dungeons. Yes, even the NPCs that you summon to the Sanctuaries will attack you if you desecrate their place.
• Experience Booster: The Grasping Ring increases the amount of salt obtained from slain enemies.
• Experience Points: Salt functions as both experience and the currency used to upgrade and transmute equipment.
• Expy:
  • As Salt and Sanctuary is utterly shameless in its Dark Souls inspirations (not that that's bad), there are several expies, mostly from the first game:
    • Ronin Cran is one for Knight Artorias — an optional disgraced knight who buffs himself up with darkness and has very persistent combos including a somersault attack.
    • Kraekan Dragon Skourzh is practically a dead ringer for Seath the Scaleless — a magic-wielding dragon who has multiple tails and no hind legs.
    • Carsejaw the Cruel heavily resembles Gravelord Nito in both appearance and combat style. The only difference is that he lacks Nito's giant shockwave attack but can Teleport Spam instead.
    • The Masterless Knight can be considered one for Siegmeyer of Catarina, due to his love of endless questing and adventuring.
    • The Nomad is one for Domhnall of Zena, selling boss armour sets after the appropriate boss is defeated.
    • The Bronze Knights play a similar role as the Black Knights, serving as endgame-level Elite Mooks who are encountered throughout the game, and implicitly serve the Final Boss.
    • The Nameless God is one for Gwyn. Both are the Final Boss of their games, both use greatswords and have a very similar grab attack, and both have sad piano music playing instead of something more appropriately heart-pounding for a boss battle.
  • The Unspeakable Deep is a double whammy. It looks very much like Cthulhu and/or his Star Spawn, but it also serves as Salt and Sanctuary's equivalent to the Vanguard from Demon's Souls, being a massive starter boss that's meant to kill you and start the adventure.
• Faction Calculus: There are seven Creeds that you can join throughout the game, and each one of them offers varying consumables, default weapons, spells, and Devotion quests.
• Fallen Hero:
  • The old man who welcomes you on the island at the beginning of the game reveals just before the final dungeon that he's actually King Jaret from the original Castle of Storms who fell into temptation and ended up a servant to the Nameless God.
  • Ronin Cran was a masterful knight who fled the Castle of Storms after some transgression.
• Falling Damage: Again, like Dark Souls, you take damage if you fall from great heights, some would instantly kill you if you don't have a high health pool.
• Fireballs: The first spell of the mage class, which is actually convenient against the first true boss (The Sodden Knight is weak to fire)
• Flaming Sword: Some spells, and the Pitchfire consumable covers your weapon with flames.
• Flavor Text: The items, equipment and weapons have text descriptions that either expand the lore or narrate how the weapons were created. Some of them even provide more details aside from those listed in the Bestiary, such as revealing some of the bosses' names (Ter Ruzpin for The Mad Alchemist, Alasdair for The Untouched Inquisitor Lenaia for the Queen of Smiles, etc...)
• Flunky Boss:
  • The Mad Alchemist, who summons Blob Monsters to pin you down before calling down fire and lightning.
  • That Stench Most Foul occasionally expels Stenchpods from its body, floating semi-sentient mouths about the size of an adult human.
• Forever War: What part of "at war for centuries" doesn't count? Although the lore implies it's mainly a series of skirmishes surrounding the rise and fall of various religions and pantheons.
• Fragile Speedster: The Tier 5 Overlord Set awarded by getting the Domination ending has much less defensive stats than the Umbral Set, but it is the lightest Heavy Armor - lesser weight and higher balance stats mean you can move and evade just as fast, and you can allocate more weight for your weapons.
• Fusion Dance: The Armor Mite is a fusion of two creatures – An Ogre Crab for its lower half and a bipedal victim for the upper.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The Axe of Splendor is noted in its description to be about as effective in combat as one would expect from an axe made of solid gold, but in gameplay the axe is actually one of the best one-handed weapons in the game.
  • There are two weapons, the Coveted and the Black Widow, that are stated in their lore to drive any who wield them to violent insanity. The versions of those weapons that can be aquired by the player don't seem to have any such effect on the player character.
• Giant Spider: Dropspiders are pale, bloated arachnids nearly as long as the player character's tall and nearly as tall as he is: they lurk in pitch black dungeon room and like to suddenly appear from thin air, descending from columns or downright dropping on top of the player, which they can also achieve through a pounce attack.
• Girls With Mustaches: Facial hair is not restricted to male characters; you can give females all kinds of beards if you feel so inclined.
• God Needs Prayer Badly: A certain optional boss fight's spoils end up stating that this is true about the Gods in this setting. The Nameless God apparently exploited this to kill them.
• Gravity Screw: The Vertigo Brand temporarily does this by inverting your character's gravitational orientation, flipping them vertically so that they can walk on what is normally the ceiling.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • You can hold the roll / evade button while in a ladder to quickly slide down. No tutorial segment nor Jurney Bottle in the early stages mention this.
  • Aside from being a guaranteed drop from The Unspeakable Deep, there is only one other way to acquire the Drowned Tome per playthrough, and it is located in an area which requires tricky jumps.
  • Several armor pieces have special properties that are not mentioned in their description, such as the Blacksmith's Gloves increasing your strength, the Jester's Crown increasing the chance of slain enemies dropping items, or the Clay Mask having the same effect as the Storm Ring.
• Guns Are Worthless: Very much averted! With high Dexterity, a upgraded top tier gun can tear through enemies and kill the final boss in about ten hits. Additionally they can open enemies to a riposte if fired just before the enemy attacks (just like in Bloodborne).
• Hammerspace: You can switch weapons instantly with a single press of a button, no matter how heavy they would be. Notable with the two-handed weapons such as Greathammers, Greataxes, and Greatswords – the weapons you swapped from would disappear in thin air.
• Hard Light: Comes in blue and red variants. The former initially manifests as wisps of purple smoke, and you need an upgrade to make it solid. The latter manifests as walls that block your path, and you need another upgrade to make them go away.
• Healing Checkpoint: The Sanctuaries and shrines restore your character to pristine condition whenever you pray on them.
• Healing Herb: Every Creed has their own healing and focus-restoring items, and the Stone Roots use a medicinal herbs for both.
• Healing Potion:
  • Every Creed has their own healing items, but the Keepers of Fire and Sky and the Order of the Betrayer are the two who offer actual healing potions in the form of Flasks of Fire for the former and Blood Vials for the latter.
  • There's also Red Shards, small vials of red liquid that slowly restore a relatively small amount of health.
• Hellhole Prison: The Red Hall of Cages — a structure seemingly made out of cages, torture devices, and curious mechanisms all making the place resemble a gigantic torture hall. But after years of rot, the line between prisoner and torturer disappeared, and they surely are happy to find a new victim: you.
• Hero of Another Story: The Masterless Knight, the Despondent Thief, and the Black Sands Sorcerer. All of them travel around the island for their own reasons, and independently uncover the secrets of its unearthly nature.
• Hint System: Just like the Souls series, you can leave messages to other players in the form of a Message in a Bottle that they can pick up and read. And again, other than sticking to the predetermined structures, players can put anything they wish, from actual, helpful advice to outright lies and anything in-between.
• Homing Projectile:
  • One of the rather tricky attacks employed by Pale Witches, a lightning ball that splits into three homing projectiles.
  • The Witch of the Lake has two attacks that fire a barrage of homing Arcane projectiles.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Several bosses and enemies fit this trope, but the best is the Nameless God, who is a deity, but unlike other gods, he is born of salt, not fire, and as such, is mortal. Not mortal in the "Will Grow Old And Die" sense, but the "Stab Him Enough Times And He'll Die" sense.
  • The Candlelit Lady is a more benign example. She looks human, but she describes herself as a being "born of light," not salt like the Player Character, all other humans, and the various gods. In fact, she appears to be the only entity in the entire game who is born of light instead of salt.
• Human Sacrifice: Talking with the Despondent Thief, the Black Sands Sorcerer, and the Old Man will reveal that this was the true purpose of your voyage: to send sacrifices to the island. It's strongly implied that the princess you were escorting was a slave disguised as a princess to hide the true nature of your "mission".
• Humongous-Headed Hammer:
  • Armor Guardians are armed with an absolutely huge bec-de-corbyn called the Obsidian Pillar that hits with an earthquake-like effect that sends your character flying. When you get one, thanks to Conservation of Mass (they're craftable but not dropped), they have a more manageable (but still monstrously heavy) size. It's mentioned in the Flavour Text for the corresponding Iron Rampart shield that Armor Titans have "near-limitless strength."
  • Crypt Guardians are armed with human-sized (as in "as big as a person") versions of the Mountainbreaker warhammer.
  • The Mountainbreaker itself is fully twenty pounds, and is said to have been "carved from a single block of granite." It's the Level VII devotion weapon for the Mountainsmith creed.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Every Creed has their own healing items. The Iron Ones offers the Hearty Roll, which is just as good at healing as any of the other creeds' healing items despite being a seemingly ordinary piece of bread. A justification for this can be found in one of the snippets of worldbuilding in the skill tree, which states that the north has a strong cultural association between baking and physical health and many of their bakers are also healers who bake medical herbs into bread.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: While there's the Weight parameter which limits what you can equip, there are no limits to how many weapons, armor, and items are stored in your inventory.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Impaled Knights were those who attempted to instigate a rebellion against Carsejaw the Cruel. There fates? Being impaled on stakes while standing upright. Some of them even had their heads replaced by horses. And oh, don't think that they've truly died from this, as they will jump and attack you when you approach them.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: The Trinity Scepter is basically a scepter once used for channeling magic. But due to its massive size, it is used and classified as a Greathammer for whacking your enemies.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: There are treasure chests everwhere, and most of them are found near ledges or at the corners of a room.
• Infinity -1 Sword: A lot of the Tier 4 equipment can surpass most of their "end-game" Tier 5 counterparts and that they can be upgraded faster with cheaper salt, whereas Tier 5 equipment all require Drowned items such as the extremely rare one-per-playthrough (unless you manage to kill the Unspeakable Deep) Drowned Tome. Case on point: Schrarfichter is the highest Strength-scaling Greatsword and has a faster attack speed. At 50 STR, it outclasses the Trinity Sword in terms of raw power which provides a Lifesteal effect, has a higher base attack stat but lower Strength-scaling. With the Tier 5 Greatsword skill, you can even one-hand the Schrarficter with a shield or torch on the other.
• Instant Runes: Whenever you cast a Prayer or a Spell, magic circles will appear behind your adventurer.
• Invisible Monsters: Whispermen and Whisperladies are completely invisible unless you drink a Phial of Undersight or use the Undersight spell, which temporarily allow you to see them. This even applies to their pictures in the Besitary.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Typical for a Souls-like RPG, Salt and Sanctuary's story and lore has to be pieced together from whatever you can glean from the NPCs' dialogue and the reams of Flavor Text that are available.
• Kaizo Trap: The platforming segment that allows you to reach The Blackest Vault and the guaranteed spawn location of the Drowned Tome. The area is pitch-black and you'll have to drop down several platforms while taking damage and kneeling every time you fall. Fortunately, the game provides you a hint - drop down the side where water is dripping, except for the last jump, where the platform underneath it is wooden, and guarantees your death from falling into a deep void. But if you find bottles (left by other players) telling you to jump to the right, you can evade this trap in your first try.
• Kill and Replace: The Nameless God murdered The Three, the trinity of most recently worshiped gods in the world, and took their place, using his powers to grant their miracles. They are inside the Crypt of Dead Gods, and have become undead monsters that are mere shadows of their former selves. Worse are the implications that not just the Three, but every god in history is buried in that tomb. The Three are only able to fight you because they're still reasonably "fresh". The rest are too dead, too decrepit, to be able to move anymore.
• Leap of Faith:
  • Reaching the Forgotten Three requires a set of these by the end of the route, with a dark pit like a mineshaft with platforms out of sight that will severely wound you, maybe even kill you from fall damage if you miss one. However, there is a hint, it's just hard to spot if you haven't been told of it: The candles in the background trace the path you must follow, and lead from each platform to the next.
  • Reaching the Blackest Vault, where the Order of the Betrayer sanctuary is located, requires you to jump off several ledges and take fall damage from the long drop. Missing a ledge will kill you with fall damage. There is a way to tell which side of the ledge to drop down from: see which side of the ledge has water flowing down from it.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Iron Pot the Chef gets as a starting item (one can also be found soon after battling the Queen of Smiles), is about as non-lethal as one can imagine for a cast iron pan when every other weapon is either an actual weapon or something big and/or sharp enough to act as one. However, while most other weapons have their damage improve only slightly with upgrading, the Iron Pot's damage skyrockets until at max level it hits reasonably hard, with a higher base damage than the Mountain Breaker making up for the lower Strength scaling. This means it works extremelly well when buffed since the strength of the buff depends entirely on the weapon's base damage and does not factor in the scaling bonus. It also has the "Fast Hitter" trait, making it swing much faster than other hammers, which is coincidentally the single biggest drawback of hammers. Magikarp Power in action. Unfortunately, it takes Charred items to upgrade, which means you'll be waiting quite a while before you can even upgrade it once.
• Level Grinding: You are encouraged to farm salt, and level up if you want to equip higher-tier weapons, armor and spells. Not to mention that increased parameters allow you to have a better chance against enemies from all kinds.
• Level-Locked Loot: Weapons, Armors and Spells can only be equipped if you have learned the necessary Tier Level from the Skill Tree.
• Life Drain: The Trinity Greatsword restores a minuscule amount of HP for every hit.
• Light Is Good:
  • Devera, the most unambiguously good of the deities in the setting, is described is the Goddess of Light.
  • Underneath the Watching Woods, there is the Lady of Candlelight, a gentle being who claims to be born of pure light and has the ability to forgive the player's sins and cleanse their corruption.
  • Also, one of the motivations of the Nameless God is that he was born of salt like mortals, instead of being a creature of candlelight. Being a flawed creature of salt dove him into his mad, greedy rage, as all he ever wanted was to become a creature of candlelight.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • Murdiella Mal is an ethereal butterfly-like being who wields holy magic. She's just as monstrous and horrible as any other Kraekan.
  • On the humanoid end of the scale, there's the Untouched Inquisitor, who is unquestionably holy by story and mechanics, but committed some of the most evil acts you will find in the entire island (which is saying a lot).
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: At the start of the game, magic it isn't very strong due to the lack of melee options that scale with magic and the fact that you don't have much focus, but those drawbacks are quickly mitigated and a properly-equipped mage can shred bosses in seconds.
• Lightning/Fire Juxtaposition: Well, Fire and Sky, but it's basically the same. Getting out of balance in one direction or another will cause some damage, but it can be migated (or worsened) with the use of certain rings.
• Locked Door: Typical from both Dark Souls and Castlevania games. In Salt and Sanctuary, they open up shortcuts between areas, and most of them can be opened with the proper keys.
• The Lost Woods: The Watching Woods is a dark forest home to a lot of undead, Cytoplasms and Vilehawks. Its trees are so tall that there are several platforms placed just to reach the top.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: The Willpower Attribute not only increases your Stamina and Focus. It also raises your Item find rate, increasing the chances of obtaining rarer items from slain enemies.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields outright negate all damage if the corresponding resist stat reaches 100. Otherwise, it just results to damage reduction. You'll need a shield if you are dealing with enemies and bosses that rely on ranged attacks, but each successful block will slowly drain your Stamina.
• Machete Mayhem: The Red Guillotine used by the Torturers in the Red Hall of Cages. Due to the weight of the blade, its single cutting edge, and blunt tip, it's classified as an axe rather than a sword. It's also possibly the best one-handed weapon for pure Strength characters, as the Axe of Splendor requires a decent amount of Dexterity to surpass it.
• Magic Is Mental: Magic Spells increase in damage the higher your Intelligence stat becomes. This also applies to Prayers, which rely on the Wisdom stat.
• Magic Knight: While several bosses combine martial prowess with magic, two of them play this particularly straight, having the appearance of imposing armored swordsmen who also wield powerful magic:
  • The first boss, the Sodden Knight, wields a huge sword while occasionally blasting the floor with lightning magic. When he Turns Red, he combos the lightning magic with an overhead jumping slash.
  • The final boss, the Nameless God, wields a huge sword in tandem with Bullet Hell magic attacks.
• Magic Wand: Spells can only be equipped if you have these in hand, aside from the Magic Tier requirements from the Skill Tree.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Most early-game weapons have low base damage, but exceptionally high scaling. This means that many, even the lowly Midshipman's Dirk, will eventually outpace the various weapons stronger than it once you have high enough stats.
  • At the beginning, Dexterity-based characters suffer in comparison to the other builds. The weapons just don't have the raw damage or reach of the strength weapons, there's a shortage of weapons that do striking damage, and dexterity doesn't give you access to the utility of spells and prayers. Then guns, which scale off dexterity, enter the picture, and suddenly the build becomes a whole lot more powerful.
• Marriage of Convenience: Subverted. The very first lines of dialogue and some lore tidbits make it as if your destination and goal is to send the princess to her suitor in a distant island. But as your ship gets ambushed by the Kraekan, you get separated from the princess. As you progress through the island, the mission of rescuing her gets thrown away since you are now mostly fighting just to survive and escape. The only scrap of information about that plotline you get for the rest of the game are heavy implications that the whole thing was a cover for some kind of human sacrifice, with you and the rest of the crew as the sacrifices.
• Megaton Punch: Mother Merles' headbutts are not to be taken lightly. Getting knocked off a ledge and landing about half a mile away is entirely possible.
• Mercy Kill:
  • The battle against the Third Lamb is essentially putting the once-noble beast out of its misery after everything the Untouched Inquisitor did to it.
  • The battle against the Forgotten King, Knight, and Judge is one of these, as you are ending the tortured imprisonment of the Three by the Nameless God so he can steal their prayers.
  • The battle against the Nameless God is described in the entry for his equipment as being an act of mercy, as his death released him from the mad torment of his life and his unending desire to gain a soul of candlelight rather than one born from salt.
• Message in a Bottle: The Hint System, copied almost entirely from Dark Souls in the form of messages anyone can leave, takes the form of random bottles lying around with messages in them for you to read. During the Black Sands Sorcerer's sidequest, it's implied that in the context of the story, all the messages you find from other players were in fact left by you on previous respawns. You've just died and respawned so many times that you can't remember them all.
• Metal Slime: The Saltless. You can encounter a group of them as early as the Village of Smiles if you traverse an optional path. However, they tend to be found mostly in the Salt Alkamancery or the lower area of the Ziggurat of Dust. They have a very high chance of dropping Pouches, Bundles, or Bags of Salt for extra EXP, and they throw Flasks of Defilement at you, items that can take up a large chunk of your health and nullify your defense and elemental resistances. Lastly, they have a grab attack that can stun you and make you kneel, leaving you vulnerable to attacks for a few seconds.
• Metroidvania: The game is made up of one large continuous world. True to form, you gain access to new areas by acquiring movement-based abilities as you travel, and collecting keys to open locked doors.
• Mighty Glacier: The Tier 4 Umbral Set awarded for defeating Carsejaw provides the highest defense stat and elemental resistances when fully upgraded. However, it has a low balance and high weight parameters, slowing the movement speed of your character as well as making evade rolls more difficult.
• Mix-and-Match Weapon:
  • The "Flint & Steel" sword has (as the name implies) a flintlock gun built-in. It's notably the only ammo-consuming weapon that can use a charm.
  • The sword whip type weapons (Steel Centipede and Phoenix Tail) can be swung as either a sword or a whip.
• Money for Nothing: Unless you're using a weapon that needs ammunition, there's not much to buy in this game, since most weapons are found in the wild or transmuted instead of being bought. Upgrades are also done with salt, not gold. The only thing that needs any kind of saving-up is the Axe of Splendor (which admittedly requires a lot of it, costing 200,000 gold), and the only other thing remotely close to that price can be crafted with the Tree of Men's Ashes and a Shimmering Pearl. Thankfully, it is later averted when you gain the ability to buy sacks of salt with it, although the trade off is 500 gold for 100 salt.
• Monster Compendium: There's a bestiary which contains the creatures' drop lists and lore.
• Mook Maker: Brats are humanoid bird-like Kraekan who can, via Bizarre Alien Biology, regurgitate a massive azure egg which will transmute into a Fetal Brat, resembling a newborn bird.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Clay Phantoms and Things Of Arms have several pairs of arms.
• Multiple Endings: There are two major endings, with seven variants each based on which creed you're following.
  • Domination: If you talk to the "scarecrow" every time you encounter it, then you have the option to take its helmet off after defeating the Nameless God. If you do take its helmet off, then you'll automatically put it on and become the new Nameless God. This ending nets you the Overlord armor set.
  • Salvation: Simply jump down the well. You'll appear in the middle of the ocean, with the island gone and yourself as the sole survivor of the shipwreck.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: No matter how much you pump up the Strength of your characters, they will always maintain the same scrawny look.
• Mythology Gag: A few to Ska's previous games.
  • The Dishwasher: The salt-knotted hairstyle is similar to the Dishwasher's hair, while the chef "class" is likely based on his mentor, the Chef. Also the "Jaws of Death" greatsword is actually a giant pair of scissors — the same as one weapon in Dishwasher. A large number of skill nodes tell of the end of the world, describing events from the Dishwasher times in the lexicon of the era, thus referring to him as a "scullery maid".
  • Charlie Murder: One of the hair colors is called Charlie Green.
• New Game Plus: Another feature shamelessly borrowed from FromSoftware. After you beat the game, you can replay it from the beginning with all your gear and levels intact, while fighting tougher enemies. This is also recursive, with higher NG+ playthroughs being more difficult than the previous ones.
• Nintendo Hard: Oh yes. This game was modeled after the Souls series, so this comes with the territory.
• Non-Combat EXP: There are several Salt container pick-up items that provide free Salt when consumed such as the Pouch, Bag, Bundle, Sack, Case, Crate, and Chest of Salt.
• No-Sell: Enemies buffed by the Heartseeker's vision cannot be attacked (it just goes right through them). And when you attempt to riposte one, it won't take any damage for as long as the Heartseeker focuses its buff on the target.
• Note to Self: The Black Sands Sorcerer's sidequest implies that all of the messages in a bottle you keep finding (which were left by other players online) were actually left by yourself in a previous respawn. You've just died and respawned so many times that you can't remember leaving them (plus the Nameless God is probably screwing with your head).
• Oculothorax: A rather disfigured case. The Heartseekers are abominations made from human experiments wherein their hearts (and consequently, chests) are replaced by a very large encompassing eyeball that takes up a majority of their body.
• Oh, Crap!: The player will be saying this a lot, since, just like Dark Souls, this game has a habit of dropping surprise ambushes on the unwary who go running after a shiny piece of seemingly unprotected loot, or after an enemy who seems to be retreating.
• Ominous Floating Castle: Mal's Floating Castle, which can only be accessed by reversing gravity with a Vertigo Brand in an optional area, allowing you to ascend to the skies until you reach a certain platform that normalizes your gravity.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Once you learn the proper nodes from the Skill Tree, you can one-hand previously two-handed greatswords, greataxes, greathammers and polearms without any major drawbacks. These can help you carry a shield or torch on one hand and strike using a powerful weapon on the other. However, using a two-handed weapon in one hand significantly nerfs the weapon's damage.
• One-Time Dungeon: The ship level can only be accessed once (after you create a new character) and a New Game Plus won't bring you back there. Although a Sequence Breaking glitch allows you to exploit a control scheme to return to this very first level and fight The Unspeakable Deep again.
• Optional Boss: Several boss fights can be skipped.
  • The Queen of Smiles can be bypassed entirely, though it's not recommended, since killing her gives access to areas with good gear.
  • The Kraekan Cyclops can be ignored if you've taken down the Mad Alchemist first, as defeating him unlocks a door that lets you bypass the Cyclops' arena, but you'll have to fight the Jester as well. Alternately, you can ignore the Mad Alchemist and the Jester to fight the Cyclops.
• Our Demons Are Different: They're referred to as Kraekan. They're believed to originate from the sea and the most common form, called the Unspeakable Deep, resembles a certain octopus-headed eldritch horror, but they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and most of the ones you encounter are mysteriously landbound.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Again, the Kraekan: the most powerful individuals of this species, aside form Murdiella Mal, mix draconic features with aspects of deep sea beings: the Unspeakable Deep has powerful clawed arms, two flipper-like wings and stands on all four, while its head is comparatively small with cephalopod-like tentacles around the mouth; the Kraekan Cyclops is almost humanoid but it is covered in sharp quills and scales; the Kraekan Wyrm has an armored dragon body, with functional wings and powerful tail; Skourz has a slender saurian neck and prensile hands but its body ends in a mass of writhing blue tentacles.
• Our Orcs Are Different: The people of the Jinderen Archipelago at least bear a few similarities to fantasy orcs, with their dark skin, tusks, and the red sclera in their eyes, but it's hard to say what exactly they're supposed to be. Little is known about them however, as few venture into Jinderen. There don't even appear to be any marks of Jinderen culture on the island, which only makes them more mysterious.
• Our Souls Are Different: There are two kinds of souls: Saltborn and Candlelight.
  • Saltborn souls are those of normal, mortal life, with all life connected to the oceans and salt forming the physical material of the souls of mortals. When creatures die, the salt of their souls can be collected and used in various ways, although Salt Alkymancy is considered The Dark Arts by most religions and countries as it is a perversion of the natural order. Creatures born of salt can exist readily in the physical world, but are fated to die and have their salt reused in the cycle of life and death.
  • Candlelight souls are a sort of divine essence associated with the gods, the Candlelight Lady, and the higher Kraekans. Candlelit souls experience life in a mush more intense and vivid manner, but are fleeting and cannot stay within the physical world for very long; according to the Candlelit Lady, even being on the Nameless Island is difficult. The source of the conflict within the story of the game is because the Nameless God was born with a soul of salt, and desires a soul of light, and is doing everything he can to try to become a candlelit soul, to the point that he has been driven to madness.
• Outside-Context Problem: The game begins with this. A war between two expansionist nations is about to come to a close with the arranged marriage of a princess. And then a Kraekan appears seemingly out of nowhere, attacks the ship with her on board, and leaves you stranded on an island that follows its own rules.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: Mal's Floating Castle, a relatively out of the way bonus area that requires almost every brand in the game to reach, is a prime location for farming. The Crypt Keeper very near the sanctuary can drop Lord's Orders, King's Orders, and Shimmering Pearls, as well as quite a bit of money and salt, especially with the right idols placed in the sanctuary.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Souls stolen by enemies from your deaths will be permanently lost if you fail to recover them from that same enemy. The causes of which include dying from a different enemy, or from an environmetal death.
  • There are unique items that are only obtainable once per playthrough, such as the guaranteed Drowned Tome drops from the Unspeakable Deep and a chest from the left of The Blackest Vault. If you forgot to obtain them, you'll have to wait for another New Game Plus cycle.
  • Access to the Order of the Betrayer sanctuary requires a Bloody Writ, which can only be obtained by using a Stained Page to desecrate a sanctuary of another creed then dying to the enemies which spawn to defend it. If you've already converted every other sanctuary in the game to your creed, you cannot join the Order of the Betrayer. (Switching creeds to desecrate your current sanctuaries is not an option, as that itself requires at least one existing sanctuary for a creed other than yours.)
• Plague Doctor: Alchemists typically wear the beak-like mask associated with the profession, and it's even described as being filled with pleasant-smelling herbs meant to protect the wearer from illness. The Mad Alchemist fittingly also wears the mask.
• Point Build System: Your character gets stronger by allocating Black Pearls manually on the nodes of the Tree of Skill. These nodes can either be direct adjustments to the base stats, tiered requirements for wielding specific weapons and skills, or additional health and stamina potions.
• Poisoned Weapon: Can be applied to your own weapons with the right consumables. On the enemy side, a lot of the mounted crossbows in the Mire of Stench have poisoned arrows.
• Power at a Price:
  • Magic Spells work like this, as each one decreases your maximum stamina when used. Without a ring to mitigate the effect, it can completely deplete your stamina bar.
  • The Silversalt Charm boosts your weapon's attack power significantly, but drains salt with every attack.
  • The Mireheart Charm adds significant poison damage to your weapon, but attacking will also poison you.
• Power Glows: Spells and consumables that provide elemental attributes will make the weapon glow depending on the element (White for Light, Orange for Fire, Dark Green for Poison, Blue for Lightning, and Dark Red for Arcane).
• Pre-Explosion Glow: Bosses die this way, covered with glowing cracks, then glowing all over before violently exploding into mist, or a cloud of salt.
• Primitive Clubs: Certain skeletons called Primitive Bones wield a crude stone club (called Barbarian's Cudgel) against you, which you can obtain by transmuting their remains.
• Pumpkin Person: Early in the game, you can find the Ghastly Gourd, a jack-o-lantern helmet that makes you look like one. Its fairly good defenses and hidden ability to reduce the amount of wounding its wearer takes makes it a fairly popular choice of headwear in the earlygame.
• Random Drop Booster: The Kismet Stone increases your item find rate.
• Reduced Mana Cost: The Burning Sky Ring reduces the cost of magic spells and prayers.
• Reset Button: Kneeling at Sanctuaries refills all your Health, Stamina, and Creed items, as well as making non-boss enemies (except Bronze Knights) reappear.
• Respawn Point: Justified unlike the magical Bonfires of Dark Souls. Whenever you die, an unknown merchant will always drag your body to the previously-entered Sanctuary, but they take 10% of your current gold in return.
• Ring of Power: You can equip up to four rings that provide stat boosts or mostly gameplay enhancements like reducing wounding effects, increasing rolling speed, attack power, or removing mechanics like elemental imbalance.
• Save the Princess: What you set out to do once you awaken on the island. Of course, it rather quickly ends up becoming... complicated.
• Scenery Gorn: Expect to find desolate ruins, piles of corpses, and all other kind of macabre imagery in your journey across the island. Most notably, bosses are usually preceded by rows and rows of dead players on display.
• Schmuck Bait: Some unique items obtainable in the dungeons will spawn ambushing enemies even if you just get near them. A notable example is the Pumpkin head equipment being guarded by the Saltless – enemies that you are supposed to encounter only at the end-game dungeons, and can quickly whittle down your defenses and health with their Flasks of Defilement.
  • Another example is when you encounter a Cave Keeper, who starts fleeing from you into the darkness. Should you chase after it, you will quickly discover it's actually leading you to a Crypt Keeper, which you will now have to deal with should you cause it to aggro.
• Schrödinger's Player Character: Or specifically, Player class. All of the starting equipment worn by each of the classes can be found in chests. Which means, even if you didn't start with this one class, you can always find their equipment somewhere else.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • The game is not strictly linear as you can skip some boss fights if you have the right items that allow you to bypass dungeons. The existence of shortcuts also allow you to skip through parts of dungeons (such as the shortcut to the Pitchwoods from The Blackest Vault, effectively opening a path that bypasses the Spindlebeast-infested area), as well as a shortcut to Carsejaw's boss arena.
  • There is an easily-exploitable glitch that allows you to fight The Unspeakable Deep again if you fail to defeat it during the first level. Since the sinking ship is actually located above the Shivering Shore, climbing the first ladder and pressing the roll and jump buttons repeatedly at the same time (or binding them both to one key) causes you character to float upwards until you can return to the ship. You can even do this while you are near the end-game and return to the Shivering Shore. With higher stats and better equipment than when you first encounter The Unspeakable Deep, you can technically One-Hit Kill the boss.
  • Likewise, a glitch allows you to have a longer jump, giving you the opportunity to skip even boss battles by jumping at specific platforms.
• Set Bonus: Equipping armor pieces belonging to the same set will grant you an additional passive effect (which is not hinted on any tutorial), such as the Umbral Set which reduces damage taken from non-physical attacks by 80%.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Of sorts. Your mission on the island is two-fold...find your princess and escape. No matter what, you never find your princess, only the same clothing set you could see her wearing on the ship during the opening prologue. Even after the reveal that everything was a lie, and your "princess" was likely a slave as part of a lie to ship out sacrifices for the Nameless God, you never get any true closure to that side of your goals. By the time you defeat the Nameless God, you're left with the choice of escaping the island as the only survivor of a suicide mission your people clearly intended for you to never return from...or taking the Nameless God's place yourself and continuing the cycle. The only true positivity is that maybe killing the Nameless God has prevented more poor saps like yourself from being sent out to die as part of an elaborate lie.
• Shapeshifter Default Form: Mimku revert to their true squid-like forms if you attack them or fall for their trap.
• Shear Menace: The game includes a couple of Greatsword-type weapons that are classified as Greatscissors, which can be used as regular two-handed swords, or as a massive pair of shears to cut enemies to ribbons.
• Shield Bash: As opposed to light shields and bucklers that allow you to parry enemy attacks, attacking while blocking with Tower Shields will allow you to do this to enemies instead. While the bash does minimal damage to them, it greatly reduces their stamina, as employing shield bash against a shielded enemy will cause them to stagger with repeated attempts.
• Sinister Scythe: Scythes are one of the classifications of weapons that you can use, and most of them scale with Dexterity.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet:
  • The Grim suit of armor, which is typically worn by those in the Order of the Betrayer creed, consists of cloth lined with human bones. It shows you what a fun bunch they are.
  • Carsejaw the Cruel, unlike his source material, is not a skeleton made of skeletons, so he must do this to make his Gravelord Nito cosplay as accurate as possible.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • In this game, Kraken-based enemies are called "Kraekans" while Liches are called "Lietches".
  • You can leave messages inside "Jurney Bottles".
• Stance System: You can wield a weapon with one hand for versaltility when paired with shields and other weapons, and the benefit of increased attack speed. Or you can dual-wield them for stronger (but slower) attacks that can sometimes hit multiple enemies at once.
• Starter Equipment: Each of the classes have their own, but you can still find them in the dungeons regardless of which class you started with.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Like the games it's inspired by, most of the story and lore of the world has to be pieced together from what you hear the characters say as well as from the Flavor Text you read from item descriptions and the Tree of Skill.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: The Pale Witches' long hairs cover their entire face, much like the common depiction of this type of ghost.
• Super Drowning Skills: The Fort-Beyond-The-Mire and the Far Beach are connected by a large body of water between them. You need the services of the Boatman who sails you across. But if you try to jump from the boat into the water, you'll find out that it's just another of those Bottomless Pits that send you plummeting down to your death, while also overlapping with this trope.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: The Jaws of Death and Northern Cross (both greatswords) can both be used like a huge pair of scissors.
• Sword and Gun: Enforced. Guns (and crossbows) can only be equipped in the shield slot, not the weapon slot, so it's impossible to have a gun without a sword (or axe, or mace, or whatever). The only exception is Flint & Steel, which can be equipped in the weapon slot because it's a sword with a gun built into it.
• Take Me Instead: The cause of the Hanged Men in the Red Hall of Cages which led them to their deaths. This was brought upon by the law which allows anyone to save a condemned man by voluntering their life in the condemned man's place.
• Teleport Spam:
  • The Bones skeleton enemy type, though it's mostly present with Angsty Bones — they disassemble and reassemble in a blink of an eye and do it all over the place. Good luck trying to get a hit on them.
  • The Split Swordsmen use a lighter version of this trope — they'll jump up and then reappear over you attacking downwards and repeat this attack a few times.
• The Theocracy: Askaria is a mix of this and a kingdom, notable in that the state religion elevates the country's founding aristocracy as gods.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Every area you go into, and just outside of every boss area, you will see corpses on display — hung, strung up, impaled on spikes (either whole or just as a head). These aren't random, but the actual characters used by players who tried, and failed, to clear that area. So you know just what you're in for as you go in. The ones preceding Carsejaw the Cruel deserve a special mention — not only are they strung up or impaled, they're also beheaded with a horse head attached above them as mockery.
  • Even worse when you see a guy who was using the exact same equipment that you are.
  • There's also a candelabra in place just outside of each boss room, with lit candles representing how often the boss has been defeated recently.
  • And finally, if the boss is particularly nasty, you can always find the area right before the candelabra littered with bottles telling you that you're gonna have it rough.
• The Undead: A lot of enemies fall under this heading, including many of the bosses. Notably, they all are almost always described as "drowned", alluding to the fact that you, your ship and its crew (and the princess) weren't the first to end up on the island.
• Title Drop: A variation. While it is not an exact mention of the game's title. A line said by the Old Man Jaret near The Still Palace contains two out of the three words.
  Old Man: Alas, we are born of Salt, bound by Sanctuary.
• Toilet Humor: The description for the Venomous Blade incantation notes that it was hidden in code within "musings on singing with one's mouth full and an ode to farts".
• Troll: Thanks to the Message in a Bottle hint system, some players have left (or will leave more) hints that fall into this category. Such examples include bottles that tell the player "to jump down a cliff for treasure", when in reality, there is nothing there except from falling to death.
• True Sight: The Phial of Undersight and the Undersight incantation allows you to see the invisible enemies such as the Whispermen.
• Undead Child: The Drowned Porcelain enemies wouldn't be out of place in a horror game — small drowned children bearing broken porcelain masks (which were required to be worn by children of nobles) and large knives. They almost always try to grab and stab you repeatedly.
• Undying Loyalty: With emphasis on "undying": The Lietches you find in the old Ziggurat are the remains of the Sun King's most faithful court sorcerers. The Bestiary description and their dropped Ribs state they remained alive not because of the island's strange properties or any dark magic at work, but because they were just that loyal to the King, to the point death was not a good enough reason to end their service.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: How you evade attacks. With the right timing, you can get past larger enemies. But don't expect lengthy invincibility frames though, as some attacks can still damage you even when you're rolling.
• Urban Legends: Sailors believe that Vexing Brats cause illnesses, even the mildest symptoms. As such, it developed into a superstition that Vexing Brats are to be blamed for any kind of disease.
• Uriah Gambit: According to the Old Man, everyone who ended up on the island, including yourself, was betrayed in this manner by the ones who sent them on their "missions".
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: When you Descerate a Sanctuary, any non-hostile NPC will turn against you. Those merchants you've been previously trading with before? They will not hesitate to draw their weapons against you. And once you kill an NPC, they will be gone forever in that playthrough.
• Videogame Dashing: The Dart Brand provides this as a gameplay / platforming mechanic, but it can only be performed in mid-air and is limited to two consecutive dashes until you land.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The armor pieces that you equip visibly affect your character's appearance, and they are divided into categories, allowing you to mix-and-match them from varying sets into endless combinations.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Several Kraekan have the ability to do this.
  • Mimku have the ability to transform into anything, they just choose to pose as treasure chests because they've learned it's the easiest way to get a meal.
  • The False Jester chose his form in order to trick people who were looking for the actual jester.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • The Sodden Knight serves as a perfect "WELCOME TO SALT AND SANCTUARY" whack to the player's head, demonstrating exactly the sort of skills you are going to need in order to get through the island. Beating him requires a display of every basic skill that'll get you through the rest of the game (namely read enemy patterns, anticipate them, then dodge or block with the right timing) and (especially to those who haven't played Souls-likes before) he will keep you at bay until you can truly "Git Gud" and learn the proper playstyle.
  • The third boss, the Mad Alchemist, proves a challenge for new players. Whereas the first two bosses are fairly ponderous with easy to read tells, the Alchemist moves very fast, spamming his potions across the arena to unleash fireballs, lightning storms, spectral blades, and poisonous blobs. If he isn't finished quickly, the player will be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of spells piling up in the boss arena. Relying too much on sword and board will prove to be fatal, as the elemental and poison attacks chew through your meagre defences at such an early point in the game.
  • The Kraeken Wyrm, as well as the Third Lamb. Both bosses pose considerably greater challenge than the previous ones, and you do not want to get into these fights unprepared. Especially the Third Lamb gets incredibly erratic and much more aggressive in the second phase, and is perfectly capable of ending you very quickly. The Kraeken Wyrm is there to teach you just how dangerous the wounding mechanic can be — should you come unprepared, you can easily end up with your max HP halved a minute into the boss fight.
  • The Tree of Men is another example — in most boss fights, you could simply roll through most attacks or even take them and just just heal back the damage you took. But this time around, you need to attack specific weak points and make use of the environment to do so, while also paying attention to where you stand. This is where you learn that rolling is not everything, and that you better learn some actual platforming if you want to keep going.
• Wall Jump: The Shadowflip Brand grants you this as a platforming mechanic, and you can combine it with the Dart Brand if the gap between the walls is wide enough.
• Warp Whistle: Calling Horns allow you to teleport to any Sanctuary that has a Guide in it.
• Was Once a Man:
  • The description of the Shrouded Bulwark states that the Sodden Knight was once Sir Francis the Resolute, a martyred hero of Tristin who has now arisen in cursed undeath.
  • The Queen of Smiles was once a tyrannical queen of Liven, and is now a horribly disfigured undead monstrosity.
  • The Disemboweled Husk was once a feared pirate, but is now a horrific undead monstrosity puppeteered by a small doll. It's stated that his current state is the work of a witch, though her exact motivations for inflicting this torment upon him are unclear.
  • The Dried King was once a proud and mighty ruler, now a shambling skeleton.
  • The Nameless God was born mortal, but the power of the island made him something both more and less than human. However, no amount of power could give him what he really wanted — a candlelit soul like the souls of the true gods born of fire.
• Weapon for Intimidation: As stated in their description, the Martial Flairs are carried by the street thugs as tools of intimidation.
• Wham Line:
  • From the Old Man once you reach the Siam Lake:
    Old Man: Fleshy flotsam... with a shared secret. You are all the betrayed, you are. I've seen slaves and whores masquerading as nobles. I've seen soldiers and sailors wrecked from the same ship with different ideas as to what their mission was. You sad, sad wanderers. Do you know by whom you were betrayed? And why? You had your princess to find. Or did you?
  • The three sidequest NPCs all drop one at some point in their respective sidequests, as they realize that something very strange is going on.
    Masterless Knight: The Red Hall of Cages should not be here. It should be in Askaria. It's an infamous dungeon there, well known for its legacy of blood and misery. So why is it here? Even... that castle we were just in. Did it not remind you of Cloudencasse in Kulka'as? I've never seen it in person, actually, but I know enough about it to know that that castle did not belong here. Cloudencasse... the Red Hall... these are near-perfect replicas, all together here. Is this the work of some mad architect?
    Despondent Thief: I... I found him. My nobleman, I mean. I recognized his dress, I'd only seen him from afar before, but there he was, up close, dead. I cut his robes off in search of jewels. You know what I found? I found a brand on his neck. They don't put brands on the necks of noblemen. Know who they put brands on the necks of? Slaves. A slave in nobleman's dress. What's a slave doing in nobleman's dress?
    Black Sands Sorcerer: This ziggurat we're in... well... it reminds me of that great tomb built by the Sun King of Kulka'as. [...] When I found this ziggurat, I thought I'd gone mad. But I'm no stranger to dark magic. Imagine a demon that feeds off of the ruins of nations.... a demon that... "collects." Such a powerful being could dwell on this island. Or perhaps this island is the demon. And it feeds... claiming men, women, kings, countries.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • You don't rescue the princess, and you never really find out what happened to her. The most you have to go on is a dress that matches what she was wearing in the prologue, implying that she washed up on the island and was eventually killed. And that's assuming she didn't just drown when the ship sank. It's also possible she was never even a princess in the first place, but a slave who was simply dressed up for a sacrifice, but you never get the full story on that either.
  • The Marauders who ambushed your ship. You never actually meet any of them once you arrive on the island. Their description in the bestiary states that none made it to the same place as you.
    They killed your captain, but you alone washed up on the shore.
• Whatevermancy: Salt Alkymancy, which is the origin of all the monsters found on the unnamed island.
• Whip Sword: Two of the whips in the game are classified as "Sword Whips". When wielded in one-hand, they remain in sword form during light attacks and extend during heavy attacks. Despite the name, you don't need to level up Swords in the Skill Tree to use them, only Whips.
• Wutai: The kingdom of Kar'hi, where the only two katanas in the game originate from.
• Zip Mode: Guide NPCs allow you to travel to friendly sanctuaries that you have already claimed and visited at least once for that playthrough.

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