Saltsea Chronicles (2023)

I really loved Mutazione, but it felt like Saltsea Chronicles was barely on my radar by the time Die Gute Fabrik halted operations. I'm thankful for the friend who gifted me a copy, providing an excuse to push past the sadness over the studio's closure to give their swan song (at least for now) a fair shake.

Many of the things I enjoyed about Mutazione are alive and well in Saltsea:

• The writing! While many well-regarded narrative games lose me with long-winded prose, there's an airy naturalism and concise wit to the Die Gute Fabrik's dialog that always holds my attention.
• The visuals! I really admire the wonky, off-register 70s screen print look. It's so unique and so well suited to the stories they tell.
• The diversity of characters and perspectives! It is always so refreshing to see stories unfold from points of view I hadn't considered.
• The music! Never insistent, but always evocative and compelling.

The biggest changes between Mutazione and Saltsea are its branching story paths, multiple characters and multiple locations. On these elements, my feelings are a bit more mixed.

On one hand, Saltsea Chronicles feels more ambitious and grand. Visiting multiple islands makes the world seem larger, the crew provides opportunities to explore the game's themes more deeply, and the branching paths give the choices you make more consequence (while also encouraging multiple playthroughs).

On the other hand, I never felt as at home aboard the De Kelpie as I did on Mutazione: There's a distance to the presentation of the crew's quarters compared to the rest of your journey. And Saltsea suffers a little from the problem of many "choose-your-own-adventure" games, in that it redistributes some of the impact of its conclusion to those individual choices along the way. I also felt some friction between the game's branching paths and its excellent character development: I wanted to explore other options, but I felt a nagging sense of "this character wouldn't do that, though."

But those are minor critiques. Saltsea Chronicles is a wonderful compliment to Mutazione, and an excellent narrative-heavy point-and-click adventure. Its themes of trust, vulnerability and generational guilt and trauma are really well conveyed. It deserves more praise and attention.

Die Gute Fabrik is closing due to lack of funding, cancelled their current project and is now helping their devs find new roles at other studios. I’m really bummed. Both Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles are beautiful games and I’m sad that we might not see something from this team again 😞

If I didn’t already own their games (a couple times over for Mutazione) I’d buy them right now to send some support their way. Maybe I should buy it for another platform. Or gift some copies to people. I would love more people to play Saltsea Chronicles.

💙 Buying our games continues to be the best way to support us. We’re so proud of all our team members and what we’ve made together and we hope that Die Gute Fabrik will return to production again in the future.

💚 Thanks for being along for the ride.

— Die Gute Fabrik (@gutefabrik) February 26, 2024

Finished this up, it's an odd one to rate. The world and characters are really fun, the dialogue's pretty good, there's excellent queer rep, the art's sumptuous and playful like a classic children's book you never read. If the game was simply about sailing around an archipelago and meeting all its lovely inhabitants, it'd be great.

But the main plot is perilously dull from beginning to end, and takes up far too much space. Every island you visit has a checklist of boring tasks you have to complete in service of hunting down your missing captain, which you mechanically run through the same way every time. These communities are lived-in and wonderfully imaginative, but I found it hard to connect with them when my presence there felt so completely transactional.

This demo was cool, it's a narrative adventure where you visit various islands in search of your missing captain. The relationships between the half dozen crew members add a fun wrinkle; they all have interpersonal issues to sort through and you'll see different events play out on the island away missions depending on who you choose to take. Lovely visuals, too, and it's rad to see a game with a new mom in a leading role.

Demo version forces an unlocked frame rate and ran at like 400 fps on my PC, pushing my GPU a bit hotter than I'd like. Also had an audible hiss underlying the music at all times. But hopefully those issues will be sorted upon release!