Saltwrack by Antemaion
Flavor: literary horror inflected expedition
Playtime: 31 minutes
This was a really fun one. The genre is definitely horror, a slower kind that revels in descriptions and the uncanny. I saw several others mention the Southern Reach series as a comparator, which I agree with, and there’s also a decent helping of “contagion” body horror.
The writing was poetic and evocative, and I rarely object to an appearance of “cnidarian”. The world is well-developed, we have words like “oilshell” and “oilsilk” for plastic, mentions of the different economic structures adopted by the different cities (the fascinating background drop about that guy who got exiled for bringing someone “back to life”). The backstory on the expedition was interesting—my personal take was that it did sound kind of like a foolish, wasteful plan for little clear benefit (just like those boring squares back home said!), so that made me think the PC was foolish/reckless in that way—if I was supposed to have learned why it wasn’t foolish or wasteful I missed that.
I enjoyed learning about the companions and wouldn’t have minded a bit more, although I take it our culture is somewhat repressed. (It may or may not have been an inspiration, but the option to ask your companions their names after a good period of travel reminded me of the anecdote about Hjalmar Johansen and Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian polar explorers who ended up wintering in a 3 foot hole on Franz Josef Land–as the story goes, they lived in the hole for three months before they started using informal pronouns for one another.)
The simple tracker at the top did an elegant job letting me know how the journey was going. (Since I saw it mentioned elsewhere, I guess I should throw in that I *did* actually think the whole time that food was being tracked behind the scenes.)
The two things that come to mind that I think might have made me like it even better are, (1) I wouldn’t have minded feeling more emotional impact from companion deaths—at least when it happened to me, it was so fast, and I didn’t even have the option to make a (possibly doomed) attempt to help, that it felt pretty muted. (2) there were some spots I would have liked more choices! I kind of wanted the option to assemble the world’s worst crew (although I get that would probably be harder to code) and occasionally the PC would just do things I didn’t really want to do. (After visiting the epicenter, it kind of seemed to me that perhaps my community would be better off if I self-exiled, but just not going back wasn’t an option, which put me kind of at odds with the game [I did, despite my ambivalence, make it back]).
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