Steam Challenge: Salt

-Welcome to this series where I resolve to play my Steam games backlog! Here are my discoveries!-

Game: Salt
Time Played: 6.4 hours

Salt has a free demo, btw! Just go to the Salt page and click Download Demo.

I picked up Salt earlier this year during the Steam summer sale and had all intentions to play it. I was waiting a bit until they patched in the updated UI and the new NPC models, and I’m glad I did. Just those two elements alone really improved the quality of play in this game.

Salt describes itself as:

Salt is a high seas adventure and island exploration game set in an infinite procedurally generated world. Sail across a vast ocean exploring massive islands, fighting pirates and bosses, taking on quests, building ships, and gearing up with rare weapons and armor, preparing for the next adventure.

And I agree with this. It may appear to be one of the numerous crafting survival type games, but honestly, it focuses less on survival (at this point in development) than it does on exploration. In fact, while there is a gauge for your hunger level, you can’t die of starvation (yet). I never really had a problem with this because I was able to either forage enough fruit, loot food from pirates, hunt deer meat, or fish up my own meals.

The graphic style has made no attempt to be realistic. This might push a few people away from the game, but I honestly like the soft, artistic islands. I also appreciate the feeling of sailing on the seas, where the waves rise and fall as you move from island to island.

 

Though you start out by building a little raft, after exploring a few islands, you can usually find what you need to upgrade to a little sailboat. Once I got my new boat, then I really felt like I was sailing the ocean!

There are actually NPCs, such as an Innkeeper and a Merchant, who give you quests once you find them. This is easier said than done for a new player, but gave me the feeling of being on a grand adventure. I remember reading on the forums to look for a light on the ocean. One night, while I was fishing and waiting for time to pass, I saw the light, flickering out on the horizon.

So the next night, I packed up my boat, stocked up on torches and set out on a quest to locate the light. Sometimes new islands would get in the way of my progress, but for the most part, this wasn’t difficult to do.

I soon discovered this light was a buoy of sorts! And when I looked up info on it, I read that these lights signify the island nearby has an Innkeeper. So, I explored the island and found lots of neat stone statues…

And even a shrine type thing that gave me an awesome metal breastplate!

After exploring, I did, indeed, locate the Innkeeper. I could sleep in the beds to make night pass more quickly. And he had a quest that challenged me to face the pirates on the nearby islands.

In the process of this, I dug up buried treasure…

Defeated pirates and their captain…

And looted a treasure chest that gave me a compass and the item the Innkeeper sent me after!

Once I returned to the Innkeeper, he provided me with information on where to find a merchant. He also gave me a sextant that allowed me to check coordinates to know my location. Seems the Salt community likes to use this to fill out their own maps. The cool thing about this is you can rename your world’s seed (similar to games like Terraria, Starbound and 7D2D) and it will roll a different map for you to chart every time. No two games will be the same!

This game is Steam Early Access, but I’m having a great time with it. If the graphics aren’t a big deal to you, and you’re looking for a game that’s less about constantly dying and more about sailing, fighting pirates, and exploration, Salt might be something to look into.

Salt has its own wiki and dev blog as well.