What Saint Slayer is
Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege is an NES-style 2D action game set in late-17th century Europe, in the year 1698. You play as Rudiger, an ex-soldier turned farmer, and you carry the Spear of Sacrilege. Father Pacer, a corrupt Catholic priest, has broken the peace agreed after the War of the Grand Alliance and is stealing Catholic relics across the Holy Roman Empire, with a horde of monsters and minions behind him. Your job is to stop him and become Saint Slayer.
The game is built around a 21-stage single player campaign with seven boss fights. It uses retro pixel art in the NES tradition and an 8-bit chiptune soundtrack. Along the way you find and befriend animal familiars, collect unlockable upgrades and bonuses, and come across choices where you can help or hurt the people you meet on the path. Those choices feed into replays, since the game supports challenges, achievements, and passwords.
Playing it together with friends
The full 21-stage campaign can be played entirely in two-player co-op, so you and a friend can run the whole thing side by side rather than taking turns. Because it is local co-op, two people on one machine are the natural setup. If everyone is scattered across different places, Steam's Remote Play Together feature lets one person host and the rest join in over the network.
Since the run includes the help-or-hurt choices, two players can disagree about what to do with people they encounter, which makes each playthrough a bit different from the last. Between the bosses, familiars, and upgrades, there is plenty to split up and compare when you talk the run over afterward.
Before you start
Expect gore. The game leans into it, and the dark fantasy setting includes demons, monsters, and horror alongside the dark humor. The pixel art and chiptune sound are deliberately 1980s and 1990s in style, so it plays like a period console game rather than a modern action title.
Passwords handle saving, so write them down if you plan to come back to a campaign later. The unlockable upgrades and challenges reward running the game more than once, and the choices you make along the way give you a reason to see the other side of them.