Saltwrack

When I was little, I thought that the most important reason why it might be kinda fun to be rich is that you could hire somebody to be on call so that anytime you had a question about why the world was a certain way, they could run off to the library and do a bunch of research and come back and tell you the answer. The internet sorta scratches that itch, and in that respect I was right, it was awesome, but as far as I can tell from intermittent half-hearted Googles every couple of years over the decade or so I’ve pondered this mystery, no one has posed a robust answer to this question: given that basically every American in their late thirties to mid forties played the Oregon Trail to death in their elementary school computer labs, why are there so few clones, knock-offs, and spiritual sequels? Sure, there were some actual sequels, I’m aware of a series of Android-only fantasy RPGs that take a similar approach, and then more recently some satirical riffs like The Organ Trail have popped up in indie spaces – plus it’s certainly the case that some of the aspects of the game’s design have shown up in the DNA of roguelites like FTL. But given the ubiquity of the original, I’ve always been surprised that it’s inspired so few direct followers, and if I could fund whatever nerdy research projects I wanted, getting to the bottom of this conundrum would be high on the list.

Saltwrack is evidence in favor of my “there’s less Oregon Trail than you’d think” thesis, though that’s one of the less interesting things about it. This medium-length Twine game is working in an identifiable sci-fi tradition, exploring the aftermath of the uncanny ecological transformations wrought by an otherworldly incursion. But where Stalker situates the event in the steppes and Annihilation in the swamps, Saltwrack opts for the more-exotic-still polar salt flats. There’s a straightforward quest narrative, and characters with their own perspectives and backstories – you’ve decided you’re going to venture north until you can find the origin point for the eponymous Saltwrack, traveling in a sort of walking tank with a crusty guide and a psychic navigator – but the environment is the true star here. The post-collapse civilization gets a fair bit of world-building and is interesting enough, but pales in comparison to the restrained, evocative, and ominous descriptions of the changed landscape. Even before the metamorphoses are given free rein, these are a highlight:

"You pass through a landscape of short, gritty cliffs. Rectangular segments of rock lie littered in the snow beneath them. Lichens splotch the stone in unexpected colors: brilliant orange, soft green, scabby red."

Things escalate, of course, but the prose retains a slight detachment, a slight flattening, that I found made the weirdness feel more immediate and concrete: not bent on evoking any particular reaction in either the protagonist or the player, content simply to exist, independent of humanity:

"In the ice itself you find other wonders. Silicaceous networks and lattices, tubes, vase- and flower-shapes; you wonder if these are some relative of sea sponges or corals, and if so, how they could have made their way onto this land. Cnidarian clumps of tendrils, too, that hang from boulders or slabs of ice. Soft-bodied crawlers cling to these glacial reefs."

The gameplay around all this is structured as a there-and-back-again trek: throughout, a header tracks the time you’ve spent traveling, the number of miles you’ve accumulated, and a qualitative assessment of your supply level. You make some initial decisions about who to bring (you’ve a choice of two guides, and a choice of two “oracles”) and whether to overburden yourself to increase your stock of supplies, and from there you march through the journey day by day, typically facing a binary choice or two around the evening. Some of these are purely narrative – choosing which of your companions to chit-chat with while making camp, say – and others are fairly clearly testing how much the player is interested in dawdling to investigate interesting phenomena at the expense of quick progress to the goal. A few are higher-stakes, like planning how to cross a mountain range in the way of your route, or, once you get close to your destination, how much danger to life and mind to risk in pursuit of knowledge. They’re all reasonably engaging, but like the rest of the game, they tend to be dry and rather diffuse: again, you typically only have two choices (seeing the guide smoking a cigarette, you can only ask to try some or scold them), and the variety of different kinds of scenarios, and the relative scarcity of decisions, meant that it was over a week before I felt like I had even the slightest sense of who the companion characters were.

Contributing to the vague dissociative vibe the game projects is its refusal to go full Oregon Trail. Supplies are kept abstract, and the outcomes of your decisions are stated in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. A few times I pushed on to travel past dusk to avoid a danger, or overruled a companion’s suggestion, or saw some of my food spoiled by environmental contamination, but those displays at the top didn’t budge, and save for the climax, few if any of my decisions felt like they had any consequences past the scene in which I made them. And several elements of the game’s progression feel more tied to narrative considerations than systemic ones – I was told that packing supplies for 40 days should be adequate for a journey of several hundred miles, but it wasn’t until day 24, after going around a thousand miles, that my supplies finally ticked down from “plentiful” to “sufficient” (they finally gave out at a suitably climactic moment that also makes me suspicious of hand-waving in the background). This sense that my decisions weren’t having that much impact was exacerbated by some small bugs I found near the end, where one of my companies appeared to disappear without any direction mention that that’d happened; conversely, back at the beginning of the game the first choice you make is what title you’d like others to refer to you by, with clear social implications stated for the different options, but I only remembered it coming up once or twice, and seeming entirely cosmetic when it did.

I’m not too hung up on how gamey or “interactive” a particular game is, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a weakness that Saltwrack doesn’t track exactly how much food you have down to the pound, or pop up a numerical morale score for the companions that fluctuates according to your choices. But it did feel like a lot of the game was built around the expectation that these things would matter – that header, those go-slow-vs-go-fast dilemmas – so once I started feeling that a lot of it was for show, I got less enthusiastic about going through the motions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since as mentioned just focusing on Saltwrack’s scenery is a compelling experience by itself. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the version of the game that didn’t even feint in this direction, perhaps by communicating to the player that they wouldn’t need to worry about getting to the end, and thereby creating space for decisions about how they explore the world, rather than whether they explore it or simply beaver away at the trek (creating more opportunities to delve into the world’s mystery might also help make the slightly-underwhelming final revelations land with more force). Don’t get me wrong, Saltwrack is a worthwhile experience even in its current form – but it’s certainly consistent with the observation that even when developers lift the wagon train from of Oregon, they frequently leave the mechanics behind.