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Featured Presentation
Hello, fellow Patrons! My name is Leon, and today I bring you all a review of the game Salt and Sanctuary, a 2D action role-playing game developed and published by Ska Studios. The game was released on March 15th, 2016, for the PlayStation 4, with later releases for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.
Ship-bound on a fateful journey across the thundering seas, to fulfill a political wedding that will bring a uneasy peace to your homeland, the ship is boarded by marauders and a malevolent creature of the deep sea, bringing the ship to destruction regardless of your actions.
Awakening on the beach, you meet an old man who leads you to Sanctuary, the start to a journey across the mysterious island, composed of various entities from faraway lands. There they must fight the largely undead population known as saltborn, as well as the Kraeken and their dark lord known as the Nameless God, as well as the Lovecraftian creatures they have unleashed.
This game is hard. Really hard. Until you get a hang of the steep difficulty curve utilized throughout the game, it's going to be an uphill battle learning how to progress through each area of the map, and the various bosses that block your passage to the Nameless God.
That being said, this game is incredibly fun, and it wasn't often that I would have to put the game down due to overly-frustrating sections. Like other Souls-like games, dying doesn't necessarily mean that you lose everything; you must pay a small portion of your collected gold while being revived, but your salt, which is acquired by defeating enemies and is used to level up both yourself and your equipment, can be recovered by defeating either the enemy that killed you, or the phantom that appears should you die to traps, or by falling to your death.
The first playthrough is rather simple, as the game does a fairly good job at prodding you in the right direction, and keeping you away from shortcuts, which are usually protected by difficult enemies and bosses not meant to be fought by newer players. The enemies and locations will become exponentially more dark and creepy as you progress through the island, with items you collect explaining where you are, and what you're facing in your perilous journey, which is a welcome change compared to other similar RPGs.
Veteran players, however, have many more opportunities available to them, as the island is wholly accessible to those that know the hidden shortcuts scattered all over, providing even further challenges to those looking for em.
As you continue to conquer the island, you will come across many Sanctuaries, each of which houses a Creed that worships certain deities. Only one Creed can be vowed to at a time, but once you have found the one that suits you the most, other Sanctuaries can then be purged of their followers, allowing you to spread your devotion. Each of these Sanctuaries can house NPCs that will make your journey easier, which will already be present, or can be acquired by offering certain stone talismans to the Sanctuary's shrine. As you improve your devotion, your Creed will progressively offer more and more unique perks, making your choice a very important one. Choose wisely.
The bosses are typically unique, and you must fight them with caution if you are going to succeed against them. The weapons and magic you collect are very useful in changing up your playstyle, and if you decide to stick to just one or two different styles of fighting, chances are, you're not going to have a very successful time getting past most bosses, as they will require you to adapt.
- Hard, yet incredibly fun. S&S employs many different forms of weapons and magic, utilizing weapon skills that can easily change how you play the game and tackle different enemies.
- The amount of enemies is massive, and it's guaranteed to run into something new and exciting in every level. Learning their patterns is a fun challenge, and not many are what I would consider overly-broken.
- Bosses are vicious, and going in unprepared will be a harrowing experience. That being said, most bosses, which relentless, allow for many opportunities to stay alive long enough to learn their patterns and effectively fight them. These fights are just challenging, and just forgiving enough to be fun and not rage-inducing.
- Similar to other Souls-like games, S&S tells its story through item-descriptions, and it is very easy to miss the story should you rush through the game, or neglect to talk to the various NPCs. This leaves the world a mysterious and cryptic one, leaving you to wonder where you are, what happened to you, and the consequences of your presence in this Lovecraftian setting.
- The NPCs are typically an interesting and varied lot, providing quite a bit of insight and intrigue should you take the time to seek them out and unlock their different endings. Well worth the effort, although very easy to miss should you skip certain areas and bosses.
- The Sanctuary mechanic is a fairly simple one, yet, it is very difficult to utilize them to their fullest potential. There are many important and unique items that can only be obtained by ranking up through a Creed, yet only one Creed can be joined at a time, coming at a rather hefty cost.
- This is exasperated further, since the only way to add NPCs to a given sanctuary is by using the very limited stone consumables that summon them, making a full Sanctuary playthrough only entirely plausible by saving up these items until at least New Game ++.
- Enemies spike in difficulty... frequently, and drastically. It is very common to have little to no trouble fighting enemies on one screen, and then having an enemy two-shot you the next screen.
- Ranged weapons... suck. There are many sections of the game where ranged weaponry is the best way of handling an obstacle, yet it is so incredibly slow to aim and shoot, and so many enemies can be ontop of you in less than a second, there are very few scenarios where a ranged weapon can be properly utilized without becoming compromised by doing so.
- There are quite a few parts in the game where parkour is necessary. The problem, however, is that parkour is not very fleshed out in the game, consisting of only rather limited jumps. Add this onto obnoxious enemy placements, and precise jumps, parkour can get very frustrating, very fast, with non-forgiving fall-damage.
The ending itself, while not much of a surprise, was still a satisfying one, while leaving quite a bit of the background story still up to your imagination, and leading straight into New Game + for those looking to unlock different endings. All in all, S&S has easily become one of my favourite Souls-like games, and I'd have to score it a 9.5 out of 10.
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Hello, fellow Patrons! My name is Leon, and today I bring you all a review of the Fallout 4 mod, Sim Settlements. This mod is available for PC users, and can be downloaded from the Nexus modding community.
Sim Settlements aims to make the Fallout 4 settlement building system exponentially better by adding dynamic progression for your settlers. Find a location you like? Set down the sort of zone you prefer for the area, and set out an outline for your newest settlement.
Over time, as you make your settlers more happy and you provide them with more resources that they need, your settlers will begin building up your tiny settlement gradually, eventually into a town, and finally into a city worth boasting about!
As well as watching your settlements build themselves as you go out and explore the Commonwealth, your settlers will also react on their own to their homes, going about their own business, and redecorating their homes so that you're not having to micromanage their every action.
- Once you have used this mod for any extended period of time, you simply will not want to go back. The way this mod changes the settlement mechanic in Fallout 4, puts the devs to shame in their minimal efforts, and hopefully this mod will help pave the way for future titles that use such a mechanic.
- Your settlers will be taxed! The happier your settlers are, and the larger your settlements get, will reward you for your efforts by putting even more of those sweet caps into your pockets. Don't expect to put in all of that hard work while your settlers reap all of the benefits.
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- While you can set an outline for how you want your city to grow, and how you want it to look, a lot of times settlers build things that simply look out of place. Thankfully it's easy to just remove these buildings manually, but it is a bit annoying at times to come back home from a long trek, to find a bunch of odd looking constructs in odd locations; especially when said constructs are blocking off important paths through the settlement.
- This mod if very intensive, and can be difficult to run on lower-tier setups. Because of this, especially as you build more and more settlements up, your game can run into latency issues, and, at times, may even cause your game to crash to desktop. Make sure if you want to try out this mod, to have the specs necessary to run it.
- Going off of the prior point, because of how intensive this mod is, it touches upon quite a few of the game's assets, making this mod rather difficult to get to work with many other mods.
If you enjoy Fallout 4 for its building mechanics, then this mod is a must. Just be prepared for how fun this mod can be, because you will very easily get caught up in it, forgetting about the main story in favour of gathering resources instead.
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