Game 3 of 2024: Saltsea Chronicles

Saltsea Chronicles

Developer: Die Gute Fabrik
Publisher: Die Gute Fabrik
Platform: PC
Genre: Narrative Adventure

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: ~6

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7.4/10

Saltsea Chronicles is an narrative adventure game where you guide a ship's crew in search of their missing captain. You journey through a post-Flood world, in which many of today's cities have been submerged and tales of the Hoarders of times past warn the inhabitants of Saltsea against greed and selfishness.

Saltsea is beautifully illustrated in a sort of cutout style that is reminiscent of children's picture books. The gameplay is mostly reading, but you do make a lot of choices that can affect tensions among the crewmembers. Some characters will argue and make up, some will develop feelings for one another, and some issues between characters will go unresolved. You can view all the current issues in your logbook, so you can keep track. This adds a nice layer to the standard visual novel format.

The islands you get to explore are vibrant, interesting, and quite frankly the best part of the game.

You can make choices as to where your crew goes at certain points in the story, but there is no free roam around Saltsea, which I actually appreciated in this narrative-heavy game. There is a card game you can play on most of the islands that's reminiscent of Hearts, but I don't care for card games all that much so I mostly skipped it.

The characters are all diverse and interesting with their own hang ups and skills and while I enjoyed getting to know them over the course of the story, the real hero here is the world of Saltsea itself.

Saltsea is an archipelago isolated from the world at large by a great storm. As far as they know, they are the only people left after a worldwide apocalypse known as the Flood. The islands you visit are populated by unique animals and their own interesting societies, and I made sure to click all the prompts so I could learn as much as I could before moving on.

The story itself is decent, if a little, I don't know, twee? It deals with themes like loss, betrayal, climate change and capitalism and while it's fine, it took a back seat to the world itself.

You collect some cool stickers as a record of your travels.

I'd give Saltsea Chronicles a whirl if you're into narrative adventure games like me. If nothing else, it presents a really interesting world to explore with a fascinating history. The narrative might be a little simple and kinda feels like a YA novel at times, but it's mostly well done and even has some replay value.