‘Saltsea Chronicles’ is A Wonderful Experiment in Narrative Complexity

There’s no secret that Mutazione is one of my favorite games of all time. It hits that perfect blend of inviting art, engaging interactions, and meaningful narrative focus that, to say “surpassed” my expectations, is a massive understatement. I think Mutazione is one of the best written games of all time, certainly one of the most underappreciated. Thus, my anticipation for Saltsea Chronicles, the next title by Die Gute Fabrik, Mutazione’s developers, was practically frothing by its mid-October release. And for once, I need to gush about this game before I have completed it; as soon as I finish writing, I need more Saltsea Chronicles.

The thing that I think works the best for me about Saltsea Chronicles is the commitment to narrative complexity. That is, Mutazione features a singular protagonist, Kai, whose perspective drives the narrative provided to the player. While Mutazione offers intimate dialogue that actively brings you into feeling like a part of the mutant island community, it doesn’t appear as complicated a writing project as Saltsea Chronicles immediately does. Saltsea isn’t necessarily a Disco Elysium, to point to other games’ writing excellence, but there are moments in Saltsea where I feel that level of greatness and wisdom in what the story achieves.

Saltsea Chronicles starts its story by presenting you with the array of options you have to proceed as a player. The game introduces you to five primary characters – I hesitate to call them protagonists yet, but they all feel meaningful enough to potentially be – and then immediately drops the gauntlet: this game is going to require that you mix and match characters to advance the story. In other words, you’re going to explore what the story has to say through the perspective of which characters you choose to play the game with. You’re not going to miss critical elements of Saltsea’s narrative by making these choices, the game seems to imply, but you’ll be adopting specific lenses with which to see what the story wants to explore. I, for example, started playing with the characters Murl and Iris; it seems absolutely certain that I could have gone with a mixture of Stew or Molpe, and I bet that second playthrough would be worth my time, given the writing quality and how calming Saltsea is to play.

The possibility involved with these choices makes the game feel dynamic in a way that Mutazione never dared to be – and again, I’m saying that about one of my absolute favorite games ever. Saltsea Chronicles just feels more ambitious, and I think it succeeds where it reveals that ambition to the player. The game anticipates that this amount of dialogue and narrative complexity might be a little overwhelming, so it takes a different design approach from the Flora compendium of Mutazione (I can’t resist, it’s fun seeing my name in a video game’s writing). Saltsea instead has a surprisingly dense menu that discusses background events that are important for the crew of characters, which narrative threads are active and (potentially) unresolved, an Almanac of ‘curiosities’ from the Saltsea Archipelago, and a Log that serves as a summarized transcript of what the player has heard throughout their exploration of the story thus far. 

While I haven’t necessarily felt a need to take use of these generously thorough menu texts (in the same way that I underutilized Final Fantasy XVI’s active time lore system), I am nevertheless grateful that they are present here in Saltsea Chronicles. With the life I am currently living this year, I have to take breaks from playing games in a way that I didn’t have to previously. That little reassurance of knowing that I can pop a menu open and instantly catch up from where I left off is going to be helpful in a way that will keep me hooked on the game enough to finish it. For me, one of the biggest detriments to finishing games is forgetting things about them once I have taken a break: narrative threads, controller layouts, etc. Saltsea doesn’t allow that problem to really happen, at least in terms of short-to-medium breaks, and I think that’s a massive strength to the way this game is both designed and written. I hope it keeps players like me on that proverbial hook until the finish line, because Mutazione taught me that the conclusion to Die Gute Fabrik’s stories will be worth reaching.

While my gushes about Saltsea Chronicles are general, one of the primary specific successes of this game are the characters, which cause the story to feel alive and interesting in the same way that Mutazione did. What might appear as two-dimensional characters instantly become nuanced and complicated, shades of personalities and moral spectrums. The way Saltsea spends time showing how its characters feel and how they are motivated makes you truly feel what they feel – it allows you to anticipate how they will respond and react if you choose the dialogue option “polite” instead of “argumentative,” for instance. I instantly became enamored with Iris, not just because they look cool and have a cool name, but they have the grumpy teenager vibe that I still haven’t fully shaken at 30 years old. If I’m being honest, I see myself in their precociousness (and pretentiousness).

The premise and story of Saltsea Chronicles isn’t as immediately relatable as Mutazione, for me, as it requires a longer time to establish itself and is less focused on making it a zoomed-in bildungsroman story. But to say it took longer to sink its hooks in is the farthest thing from criticism. Rather, Saltsea is a more patient game: the island feels bigger, the story feels bigger, the cast feels bigger, and the stakes feel bigger. The decision to limit the initial scope of that sense of scale, therefore, feels entirely justified. As you take in some of that size, the game clicks into place – or at least it did for me.

And a final note for what I’ve taken away from Saltsea thus far: this game brings me to a place of relaxation that a game hasn’t achieved for me in months – perhaps years. Saltsea is a game that keeps reassuring you, from its welcoming art style to its empathetic writing to its ethereal soundtrack. It even has exceptions to this rule that somehow seem like they might interrupt that feeling of relaxation, like the card game that you can actually lose. I was so surprised this card game had a fail state, but I still never felt stressed out; I simply chuckled when I lost by a meager thirteen points (okay, I do still feel bitter about it). Unlucky, you might say, but I felt lucky that this game included such a weird minigame. I returned to relaxation seamlessly in the way that you enter a warm bath.

I usually wait until I finish games to write articles about them, but Saltsea Chronicles left such an immediately strong impression that I’m willing to fully endorse it, especially if you vibed with Mutazione like I did. It iterates and evolves on some similar themes, ideas, and aesthetics in a way that scratches the itch of someone like me who kept wishing to wipe her memory and replay Mutazione for the first time again. Saltsea Chronicles achieves its success by learning from what worked in Mutazione and cultivating those successes further. Who knows, maybe I’ll be delighted by a mid-game musical garden that winks back to Mutazione and I’ll have to write a second Saltsea article sooner than I thought. Until then, I can’t wait to learn more about this beautifully presented and carefully crafted story.

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