I've put several dozen hours into Salt, and I'm still hard pressed to say why I like it. I guess there's just something deeply compelling about its cycles of presence and absence. It's a game of lush islands separated by vast expanses of blue, of intense action separated by hours of stillness, of gorgeous musical vignettes separated by long, lonely stretches of ambient quiet. It sounds dull (and it can be at times) but it fosters a sense of anticipation you rarely get in modern games. When you add that to its masterfully realized sense of place, its enormous scale, and its weird, wonky beauty, you end up with a game that's pretty epic.

I've put several dozen hours into Salt, and I'm still hard pressed to say why I like it. I guess there's just something deeply compelling about its cycles of presence and absence. It's a game of lush islands separated by vast expanses of blue, of intense action separated by hours of stillness, of gorgeous musical vignettes separated by long, lonely stretches of ambient quiet. It sounds dull (and it can be at times) but it fosters a sense of anticipation you rarely get in modern games. When you add that to its masterfully realized sense of place, its enormous scale, and its weird, wonky beauty, you end up with a game that's pretty epic.