Sea Salt oozes Lovecraftian Horror and permeates the atmosphere with its thematic music and dark art style, but fails in gameplay and story.

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The Game:

Sea Salt is a 2d action game from YCJY Games, a small Indie Studio with only one other game to date under their belt.

In Sea Salt, you are not the hero, not even the villain, but instead simply the cold agent of a lord from the deeps, Dagon. You’re duty to your god is to wipe the slate clean. You come in with the waves as a horde of swarming horrors, and wash away the righteous and wicked alike as you progress from map to map heading further inland.

Toward that end, you play as one of Dagon’s Acolytes – a chosen few beings of death and madness whom the dark one has found trust in. As an Acolyte, you’ll control your force’s movement across a variety of maps, and decide when and how they should strike.

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The Good:

There is a lot that I enjoyed in Sea Salt, first most being the lore and atmosphere of the game. Lovecraftian horror has always been a good setting for games, movies, and more. It lets writers run wild with their creative madness, and is the perfect blend of horror, mystery, and drama.

Sea Salt nails that Lovecraft vibe. Everything from the music to the art-style and the lore through the game makes for one of the best examples of Lovecraft done right I’ve ever seen.

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There is also a lot of variation in gameplay here. Each Acolyte has a different play style and favored units, and more can be unlocked via game progression and achievements. The dark forces under your command grow as you move through the game, increasing in number available and complexity of their use. To start I had only fast moving swarm units that could only attack in melee range and nothing more. By the third and fourth map I had a wide gambit of options to fight with, including Resurrecting Litches, Ranged Cultists, Strong Fishmen Terrors, and more. It makes for a lot of styles of play, and makes you think about what units to spawn and when for the best impact in a given map.

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The Mixed:

The story here is a bit of a let down. The lore is near perfect, but what is happening and why is rather boring when it comes down to it. I won’t spoil anything here, but you’ll not run into anything worth writing home about in the overall narrative. Nothing will make you ponder or strike you with surprise, and that’s a shame for such a rich source material.

The Bad:

Sea Salt’s controls scream of casual gaming. You move your forces on a gamepad with the left thumbstick, and tell them to attack with the right trigger. You summon more forces with the Y or A button, and that’s really it.

Now, if this were a casual game I would applaud the developer’s use of basic controls that require little thought or energy to master, let alone use. But there is the problem, Sea Salt is not a casual game. It looks like it wants to be one, but it’s not.

You’ll probably blow through the first half of the game with no issues and everything will feel grand, but then a wall smacks you in the face. Where before you could just idly enjoy swarming enemies with a little bit of strategy in mind, now you’ll run into large groups of powerful hunters and some rather difficultly timed heavy attacks that can wipe out most of your units in one go.

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Not only that, but because the controls are so basic, you can’t really protect specific units very well. There is no ability to tell groups to hang back, or to leave a required unit behind in situations of danger. You just have to dance back and forth with your thumbstick and try your best to wrangle everything together.

My biggest annoyance came when I had finally unlocked a specific Acolyte I had been looking forward to. This character was based around summoning spirits to fight for you with a Litch.

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Normally, these spirits are spawned from the corpses of your foes, and disappear after a short time. This Acolyte changes this, as her ability allows for spirits that never vanish unless defeated. The catch is that she herself cannot summon any other units into the game. That’s all fine and good. I’m down with it . . . . what I am not fine with is that if your single Litch dies it’s game over.

Again, there is no way to command your Litch to stay back or to be defended in anyway. This means that if at anytime a Hunter or some other foe gets a single lucky shot off, you lose. One could argue that means you just need to ‘get good,’ but I don’t buy it. It’s bad design, and could be easily fixed with a simple command to hold position.

The Verdict:

Sea Salt was a mixed bag for me. I loved the art, music, and the general Lovecraftian lore being displayed, but the gameplay disappointed and without a compelling story to make up for the poor controls and balances I doubt I’ll be coming back for more.

It’s a shame, as I see a lot of promise here. Hopefully YCJY will keep working and find some time to polish the game a bit. If so, I’d be happy to try it again. For now though, give this one a pass.