Saltsea Chronicles review - a dreamy adventure that contains multitudes

Don't call me Ishmael. Today, you can call me the whole rabbling cast of the Pequod. This is the beautiful, improbable conceit at the heart of Saltsea Chronicles, because it's a game in which you put to sea not as a sailor but as a crew. And it's a crew that's already hurting, anxious and uncertain of things. A crewmate has disappeared without warning. Where did they go? Who took them, and why? The horizon calls.

Saltsea is set in a world that floats on the flooded remains of a prior world - maybe even our world. If so, were we good ancestors? Below the waves are strange creatures and old buildings that once claimed to scrape the sky, all threaded with skate parks of coral and ornamental fronds of disco kelp. Above? Above is everything that has survived, and has collapsed over time, and has had new thinking and new communities scribbled over the top and bolted onto the edges. One island here is a submerged ocean liner, another is clearly cobbled together from flotsam.

I just looked flotsam up: debris in the water that was not deliberately thrown overboard. That's a lovely definition, and a lovely way of looking at the archipelago on which Saltsea is set. Here is a place that was inherited by accident, and the things the people who live there now love and value are the results, in part, of the granular erosion performed by time. It's a world built of bits and pieces that have been made to fit, and which have been giving new meanings. God, I love it.

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