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Review
Saltwrack follows a perilous expedition across an unforgiving arctic landscape. The story is bleak. The odds are grim. The characters search for secrets best left undisturbed.
Gameplay
Saltwrack describes itself as “post-post-apocalyptic” story in a world that has been devastated by snowfalls of salt and an ice age. The land is now one vast deposit of salt, also known as a wrack. Human civilization now resides in six cities, existing as points of light, huddled at the edges of this harsh wasteland.
You are an interpreter- a scientist. The Observational Society has agreed to fund your proposal: to journey to the center of a salty wrack to discover its secrets. No one has attempted such a journey.
But first you select two individuals to aid you on the expedition: a saltwalker and an oracle. Saltwalkers know the physical landscape through experience and excel at survival, while oracles have precognition and interpret dreams. There are two candidates for both categories, providing incentive for replays.
The entire expedition- traveling to the wrack’s center and returning to the city of Hearth- is expected to take 40 days. Player decisions center on navigating the land with the guidance provided by your travelling companions. The game keeps track of your progress at the top of the screen.
Day 1 | Miles travelled: 40 | Rations: Plentiful
You also collect specimens and samples as proof of your discoveries. And no save features, either. Death looms behind every action.
All sorts of unexpected things can happen.
(Spoiler - click to show)When you scramble out of the tent, you see the walker sitting in the vehicle, the engine running, the headlights on. You can’t understand, for a long moment.
He calls down to you over the sound of the engine. “I am sorry to do this to you. I truly am. But you’re already gone—you’ll never make it back, and I can’t help you. I can’t.”
Dude.
Really?
And btw, I DID make it back. The oracle would have made it back as well, but they chose to stay and ponder the wasteland. We were fine, all things considered. (And yes, it’s possible for the other saltwalker to leave you, but at least she just leaves because you’ve been ignoring her advice. And she doesn’t take the machine with her, either.)
What frustrates me about the gameplay is how your choices don’t always have as much influence as you would think.
For example, (Spoiler - click to show)the number of specimens I brought back to the Observational Society had no effect on whether they believed my account of the expedition. The protagonist takes notes automatically, but surely physical specimens are needed as proof, right? Turns out, you can skip every opportunity to collect samples, and the Society will still believe you.
There are also moments where the game overrides the impact of your previous choices in favor of a pre-determined outcome. Sometimes the (Spoiler - click to show)female saltwalker would leave even when I followed her advice and established a good rapport with her through conversation. It felt like the game simply wanted her to be taken out of the picture, rapport or no rapport.
Despite this occasional rigidness, the game still managed to surprise me. I didn't think it was possible, but I somehow managed to (Spoiler - click to show)make it to Hearth with the second oracle where we recovered in the hospital clinic together. Usually, the oracles either die or choose to stay in the wrack.
I enjoyed finding every salt-sign glyph encountered by the saltwalkers. I found glyphs for (Spoiler - click to show)Contamination, Trap, and Death.
Story
The game is somewhat reserved in the amount of backstory it provides, but from the looks of it, there is a dead city in the center of the wrack. This city was once a hot spot for technological advancement until something devastated the world. You intend to find its origin. Spoilers.
This origin turns out to be a research facility abandoned over two centuries ago.
What we find inside is an experiment-gone-horribly-wrong. This reveal is also one of the vaguer parts of the story. It appears to be a biological anomaly that is organic but not entirely tangible. By accessing it, it forms a parasitic connection to your mind and body. It feeds on a part of you, and that part stays behind when you leave the facility. The characters have clearly been altered.
After leaving, the characters suspect that they’ve been contaminated or infected, making them a potential danger to civilization. Because of this, completing the expedition as planned is not exactly a “happy ending.” In fact, there are no conventionally happy endings, just ones where you don’t die a horrible death. If you make it back to Hearth with your research and share your findings, everyone regards you as a pioneer! Fellow interpreters are foaming at the mouth to visit the source.
However, you are unable to fully explain the anomaly and its effects. Despite the praise you’ve received for advancing humanity's understanding of the wasteland you wonder if you've also doomed everyone as well. Future explorers will be helpless when they face the facility's secrets, and they, too, will bring traces of it back to civilization.
Sprawling like a stain, fed by your witnessing, awakened by your trespass.
The horror is exquisitely conveyed through the author’s writing.
Whatever lives in the facility is not going to scurry out the door and escape into the night because you left the door open. It doesn't need to. It knows that other individuals will arrive, and it will venture out into the world through them.
An open mouth, a hungry and wounded space, waiting.
As the player, that’s when you start to think, wow, I'm responsible for all this. Maybe the expedition was a bad idea...
Fortunately, there are other endings that are slightly more optimistic.
Further impressions
The wrack is probably the coolest (I don’t mean that as a pun) piece of frozen wasteland I’ve encountered in interactive fiction.
It’s interesting how it (Spoiler - click to show)almost has its own consciousness, tied in with the local ecosystem and (I assume) independent from what we find in the facility. Exploring the wrack for too long can result in you becoming “wrack-touched,” where you gain oracle-like abilities that enhance how you perceive the world. Your body’s biology can even be altered.
The protagonist is surprised to see that the wrack is not devoid of life. Rather, unfamiliar organisms- extremophiles- have appeared, their biology allowing them to thrive in this cold wasteland. I love the concise yet vivid way the writing describes these creatures.
Hydras, polyps, a profusion of tiny invisible life.
This life, however, is absent in the city ruins. We learn, vaguely, that the (Spoiler - click to show)anomaly created in the facility would consume natural ecosystems and produce salt as a waste product. That’s probably the clearest answer we’ll get.
We tend to envision the future as being high-tech, but Saltwrack approaches this differently. It appears that the saltfall and ice age has knocked humanity backwards in technological advancement. Any tech we encounter feels rediscovered. While there is no mention of computers or radio communication, we wear clothing made of synthetic fibers and travel in an experimental machine powered by a motor engine.
Parallels to our world
As is often the case with my reviews, I like to take a detour to explore some broader concepts. Feel free to skip this part. I'll stick it under a spoiler tag to take up less space.
Saltwrack reminds me of nuclear semiotics, an ongoing discussion and field of research on how we should store and label nuclear waste- a hazard- so that humanity of the future knows to stay away from it.
Nuclear waste is buried deep underground in repositories. Because written language evolves or becomes obsolete over time, an emphasis is placed on visual imagery to convey danger. A face contorted in disgust. Skull bones. Hostile architecture is another method, using spikes and structures that hinder access and convey the feeling of STAY AWAY.
There’s even an existing template for what signage should convey. It comes close to describing the mysterious facility- and its source room- we find in Saltwrack. Here's a sample (courtesy of Wikipedia):
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
And, most of all:
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Eerie, right?
Too bad the characters didn’t receive any of this (even if the facility isn’t a repository).
While the threat in the game is more abstract and interwoven with a fictional narrative, the implications of an abandoned danger- a danger facilitated by humanity- are relevant for us. A real-life repository may seem unremarkable, but hundreds of years from now the world may be vastly different. Perhaps these sites will possess the kind of secrecy, ambiguity, and lore as the facility featured in Saltwrack.
Visuals
Just a basic black screen with white text formatted neatly in the center. Links are underlined and stats are clearly listed at the top. Its lack of frills fits with the game’s grim, no-nonsense atmosphere.
Final thoughts
Saltwreck is an intriguingly desolate work of horror with vivid writing that conveys the bleak, salty expanse of the wrack and the expedition that attempts to cross it. There are a variety of events that can happen during the journey, encouraging many playthroughs.
Over time, the gameplay can start to feel inflexible, but the descriptiveness of the setting and its harsh realities make it difficult to turn away. I enjoyed it immensely.
(And if there’s spiky mold on your rations, don’t eat it.)
