Salted goods is a 16th century trade game in which players set out to start the East India trading company beginning with an unusually large warehouse of Salt.
Players control the game from a war table. They establish trading routes with the ports available to them and set up buy and sell orders to try and turn a profit and they can also have political dealings both in government and with other traders in an effort to further their aims. As the game progresses they gain access to more ports and goods that they can trade in and new ships they can develop and use. Throughout gameplay a variety of events will occur to which the player must respond such as storms, piracy, sicknesses and wars. Players can respond to these in a variety different ways which will have different effects on their trading prospects.
Salted Goods is a basic trading game designed to be historically accurate and give a degree of insight into the time period and the challenges the East India Trading Company may have faced while also bringing to light the potential (which was explored by the company) for them to abuse their power and partake in actions of questionable moral value.
●Historically Accurate
●Interesting moral issues that have been approached in history
●Challenging
Summary
Forget Me Not is a first person virtual reality game for the Steam VR. Players take on the role of Tweak, a memory hacker. Memory hacking is the act of altering the memories of another human, either by wiping them or adjusting them. Memory hacking is explicitly outlawed in the Geneva Convention however like all things illegal you can find someone if you dig deep enough. In the beginning of the game Tweak adjusts some fairly horrific memories for a man who stumbles in, discovering he was involved with the Yakuza. While she succeeds in wiping his memory the Yakuza are less than pleased that someone outside of their organisation knows so much however rather than killing her they kidnap her taking her to an unknown location where they have her wipe and adjust memories to their liking. Players must wipe memories while collecting information and building relationships in an attempt to either further their status in the Yakuza or try and escape them.
Gameplay
Forget Me Not takes advantage of the Steam VRs spatial tracking. The Yakuza have locked Tweak in a lab they built for her containing everything she needs. Her bed is hidden behind a room divider and a small bathroom is through one door. There are no windows and the only way in or out is a large set of locked cast iron doors. This is where all of the game will take place.
Players will interact with the various Yakuza that visit them and perform operations on patients, either wipes or memory alteration. Memory wipes are simple, players simply enter the patient's memory and start altering things to cause chaos in the memory, and once the memory becomes corrupt the player can use their DataHammer to smash the memory to pieces. Memory alteration is slightly harder, players can fast forward or rewind the memory as it plays around them to get a feel for it before pausing in certain places to alter the course of the memory, and memories are altered during the pause state by shifting things in the memory, from objects to people. The more aggressively players seek to change memories the more dangerous things become as the patients mind turns against them. Players can combat these malicious figments by duelling them using their DataHammer, a great hammer used to corrupt information.
Mindset
Forget Me Not aims to put players in a consistent world and take advantage of the Steam VR system by using small room environment's which a high level of interactability to immerse players. Using this immersion the game asks a lot of morality questions about what is right and wrong and allows players to roleplay the situation. Players may become one of their captors or rebel against them entirely. Each patient offers unique outcomes, you could leave someone entirely broken or spare them pain by blotting out specifics. Through this Forget Me Not aims to put players in an unfamiliar morality dilemma and have them constantly question their decisions as they try to find their place in the twisted world. Players should feel satisfaction at solving a memory change to the best of their ability while also trying to manipulate the Yakuza to get their desired outcome.
Highlights
● Complete immersion using the Steam VR
● Unique morality dilemma
● Variety of meaningful story choices
● Consistent world created through use of space and steam VR spatial recognition
