Don’t call me Ishmael.
Today, you’ve got the option to call me the whole rabbling cast of the Pequod.
And it’s a crew that’s already hurting, anxious and uncertain of things.
A crewmate has disappeared without warning.
Where did they go?
Who took them, and why?
If so, were we good ancestors?
One island here is a submerged ocean liner, another is clearly cobbled together from flotsam.
I just looked flotsam up: debris in the water that was not deliberately thrown overboard.
God, I love it.
It’s wonderful at finding harmonious colour pairings.
In close up they’re all Picasso ripples and single-eye perspectives.
That lovely textured colour, pasted down in friendly curving shapes.
The game unfolds, for the most part, in text.
There’s a lot of reading, but reading is brilliant and Saltsea’s also fiercely active with it.
Each island is its own community, and often its own style of game.
One is a gentle probing of group affiliations, another is an unusual murder mystery.
This is all filtered through a very simple dynamic, which proves extremely compulsive and accelerative.
It’s binary choices.
Every now and then a conversation will lead to a point where you’re asked how to react.
Or a question from someone will lead to a choice in how to respond.
Here you go: Questions/Suspicions?
From these neat double-acts, the game ripples outwards, an adventure, but never just as adventure.
These choices often form a series of steady rituals that keep things moving.
Beyond that the game opens out further, until it reaches the horizons.
The genius, though, is that these choices are not big life-changing headscratchers for the most part.
And what do you get from this?
What are you looking for?
What are we looking at?
And yet that’s not possible - and it’s to the game’s credit that it’s not.
The people here resist easy description despite being very richly conceived.
Everyone here contains multitudes.
Can adjust conversation font size and font, and can adjust the thickness of the speaker outline.
Ripples turning to waves and all that.
You must play this.
