Salt and Sanctuary: The Untouched Inquisitor and the Hidden Boss

Salt and Sanctuary — a 2D Dark Souls-style game — contains a boss called the Untouched Inquisitor that most players never see. Reaching it requires avoiding a specific NPC execution event in the Dome of the Forgotten: if you kill the NPC questgiver before he completes his execution monologue, the executed NPC survives, becomes hostile, and transforms into the Inquisitor form at the next fog gate.

The execution event is framed as background lore — a condemned prisoner being processed by a church official. The game gives no indication that the condemned prisoner is a boss, that the monologue has a trigger window, or that killing the questgiver has mechanical consequences beyond removing his shop.

Ska Studios built this boss as a discovery for players who killed NPCs out of curiosity or aggression rather than following the intended path. The boss has a unique weapon drop — the Inquisitor’s Halberd — that is only obtainable through this hidden path.

Salt and Sanctuary’s entire world was designed with hidden interactions of this density. It is a two-person project that maintained the From Software tradition of rewarding players who treated the world as a system to interrogate rather than a path to follow.