The Salt Fortress instills a sense of eeriness and dread with its pencil art style, with every aspect of its monsters, demons, and foreboding halls drawn in stark black, whites, and grays.
The Salt Fortress follows three playable heroes as they explore the place, going room by room as they have encounters, solve puzzles, deal with odd occurrences, and find clues as to the appearance of the colossal building. They will do this by clicking on which room they wish to travel to next, moving across a grid where their steps will unlock cards with descriptions of events, leading to more detailed encounters should it be necessary.
Should a fight show up in those cards, players will be taken to a turn-based battle where they can use their character’s strengths to win. Argan offers hand-to-hand melee combat skills, Drosera is a witch who uses poisonous spells, and Etna is a vampiric assassin with a sword. To use those abilities, players will choose a set stance that will strengthen and weaken their powers in combat in a way that best suits the fight with the monster, and then tap directional keys with the right timing to further increase damage or defense.
Players will want to learn these systems well, as having one of their characters fall in combat means they will lose access to them for the rest of that playthrough, having to switch to another hero. Players can also take damage from traps they come across while exploring, so combat isn’t the only way they can lose a hero, either.
The Salt Fortress is set to release in July of this year, but is looking for some Kickstarter funding to clean up some final aspects of the game and make it a bit longer than its current five-six hour play time. It is also raising votes on Greenlight for a Steam release.
