I never met a Soulslike I didn’t enjoy. They’ve got all the good stuff: being lost, dying, a sense of futility, feeling bad. What more could you possibly want in a leisure activity?

The last one I finished was Salt and Sacrifice, the recently-released sequel to the criminally underrated Salt and Sanctuary, which was unabashed about the degree to which it lifted most of its mechanics and general vibe from Dark Souls. By the end, I was a big fan of the sequel. It took a little bit of getting used to, but I think that was more my own fault than the game’s, because I came in with a few too many expectations based on the first one. The biggest one, I think, was what I thought I would get from the setting.

The first game starts with your little guy hopping out of a boat onto an island. From there, it’s a fairly standard Metroidvania structure where you run around a single giant 2D area, come across all sorts of areas you can’t access, and progressively get new abilities that let you access them. It fits right into the Soulslike structure as well, because all these various areas loop back into each other. You find a cool door, you go through, and suddenly you’re emerging from a door you saw locked before, or on the other side of some area you’ve already seen, or falling 500 floors down and splatting on the floor of a dungeon you were in earlier. You recognize stuff and patterns start forming. Dopamine starts flowing. Neat.

My guy in Salt and Sacrifice. His name is Gerald and he's a samurai.

The sequel, on the other hand, takes a cue from Demon’s Souls by having a central hub through which you can access a bunch of discrete areas, each one a kind of miniature Metroidvania with its own unique biome and different kinds of weird little guys for you to get killed by, level up a few times, and then kill easily. It makes a lot of sense for the changes they made to the gameplay, because instead of just standard Soulslike risk/reward management, you’re doing Monster Hunter-type stuff and repeatedly hunting down boss enemies for upgrade loot. It’s a solid idea, because if you’re going to end up grinding anyways (which you probably are), you might as well have a coherent and rewarding system for it.

When it comes to the setting, though, the separation of the areas left me feeling a little detached. When I was in the hub hanging out with the pile of merchants and weirdos who live to sharpen my glaive, I didn’t really know where I was. Every time I visited one of the other areas, I wasn’t clear where I was going relative to where I had just been. You might be thinking, “who cares, that doesn’t matter,” and you know, you’re basically right. Demon’s Souls has the same issue, and that’s a perfect game. As much as I love taking off all my armor and rolling around Boletaria, it never makes it easy for you to understand, for example, what Boletaria Castle and The Shrine of Storms have to do with each other. The game just isn’t interested.

Gerald after he got a glaive and Robert Pattinson Batman makeup.

That said, I think the more coherent setting was a major part of what made Dark Souls resonate with people more than Demon’s Souls did. There was a single, continuous location, and the more you moved through it, the better you understood where you were and how the areas connected to each other. That’s likely also the feeling behind one of the major criticisms of Dark Souls 2: that despite the single, continuous location, the way areas are related is often kind of incoherent for the sake of having cool stuff, like a big lava castle full of annoying guys who shoot huge arrows that knock you down and make you fall into the lava while you’re just trying to get to the Smelter Demon for the 15th time in a row. It’s a definite tradeoff.

The strongest evidence, for me, is where I found the emotional high point of Salt and Sanctuary. It wasn’t beating some particularly hard boss, like that weird tree that had a bunch of puppets hanging from it, or finally upgrading my chosen weapon, the stupidly large two-handed sword that I reluctantly accepted after failing as a dexterity guy. It was finding the far end of the island. I started the game getting out of my boat on one end – the left side of this big 2D map – and after many long hours of getting smacked like a ragdoll across the screen, I found the other end. It wasn’t even at the end of the game. I just looked out at the water, the foggy day turned to melancholy night, and felt the scale of the island. It was real to me. It made sense.

That, I think, is what was missing for me at the start of the sequel. As soon as I saw that central hub leading me to separate areas, I knew I wasn’t going to have that moment again. But that’s okay, because instead I brutalized a poor venom mage over and over again so I could take all his weird poison sacs and toxic bladders and use them to shine my boots.