Mercifully, damage persists on Mages while you’re chasing them so you don’t go back to square one when you die, but the bummer is that you have a limited amount of restorative items. I often found myself having to contend with two Mages at once, or a Mage that just camped a ledge and made it nearly impossible for me to get to where I needed to go, or a mage that would spawn extremely tough and durable enemies in an area that was already full of extremely tough and durable enemies. The big issue is that you never know what else is going to be there when a Mage decides to teleport to an area. They can feel overwhelming when you first encounter them – but after a few attempts, you start to see the openings for you to dodge, block, or attack, making them regularly land in that sweet spot of being difficult but manageable. The final phases when you actually fight the boss in their walled-off arena are generally pretty fun. Then there are the mage hunts themselves, which come with their own set of drawbacks. To add on to that, while there are plenty of checkpoints in the form of obelisks that act as respawn and restock stations, there’s no way to fast travel between them or even choose which one you want to start at when you first go from the main hub to a zone, which amounts to lots of retracing your steps through the same enemies, the same traps, the same platforming challenges over and over again, which gets very repetitive. Sure, Salt and Sanctuary didn’t have a map either (I also wish it did), but its absence matters less in that game because its levels are much more linear in their design. Trying to chart a path back to the boss you were fighting, the salt resource you dropped after dying, or the locked door that you’re now able to open is far more frustrating than it needs to be. Just to reiterate, these zones are huge, often with entire sublevels that take place above ground, underground, in large castles, and in the skies. It all looks fine on paper, but in practice, this blending of Monster Hunter, Metroidvania, and Soulslike is a far from perfect mix. You do this by initiating Mage Hunts, which are Monster Hunter-esque boss fights that have you chasing down a particular Mage all throughout the map, engaging it in several small skirmishes until it eventually settles into its proper boss arena, at which point you’re locked into a traditional boss fight. Instead of having one continuous map, Salt and Sacrifice is actually split up into five zones, each of which are enormous and sprawl out in every direction, with progression through them primarily gated by doors that only open when you devour a certain amount of named Mage hearts.

But the two games are actually very different on a fundamental level.

Salt and sanctuary map