Saltsea Chronicles (2023)

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!