Saltsea Chronicles demo is out and let's you visit an island full of cats
Playable until June 26th
Saltsea Chronicles is a seafaring adventure set on a flooded world in which you choose which crew members come along on away missions and the story branches heavily throughout. It's also a bit like Star Trek, with art and writing reminiscent of its developer's previous game, Mutazione.
If that appeals, there's now a demo available from Steam in which you can visit an island full of cats.
Here's the reveal trailer from just last week.
Katharine got to see Saltsea Chronicles and spoke to creative director Hannah Nicklin at GDC earlier this year. Nicklin described how each chapter of Saltsea would evoke different types of television - "the Scooby Doo episode, the Romeo and Juliet episode, the heist episode," and so on.
To help accomplish this, Nicklin and her team at Die Gute Fabrik created an entire writer's room for the game, drawing from the experiences of comic book artists, young adult authors, poets, theatre and television writers, as well as folks with no creative writing background whatsoever. It's an eclectic mix, but based on what I've seen so far, the result appears to a rich tapestry of surprising and personal stories that all meld together to take you on a journey like no other. As you set out to find your missing captain (and maybe solve the mystery of why lots of other survivors seem to be disappearing across the archipelago), you'll take in sights such as upside down cruise ships, a trading community that's made of boats all lashed together, an Orkney-inspired outcrop, and an island full of cats that also acts as a sanctuary for victims of domestic violence.
Which sounds fantastic.
The demo features an excerpt from chapter four of the game, although Nicklin explains on Twitter that it's the "Los Gatos version", since chapter four can take place in three possible locations depending on your prior decisions. You'll get to briefly meet your whole ship crew before choosing who to take along with you to the island, play an in-world card game, and about two-thirds of the chapter is included. The demo is available from Steam until the end of Next Fest on June 26th.