Eight slots. A whole city.
Vellamar went under in one night, eleven years ago. The water stopped forty metres above the tallest spire and simply stayed. You are a salvor, licensed, alone, working a lamp through rooms nobody has opened since. Raise an object and it plays back one memory of whoever owned it. Raise another and you learn what they lost. Your cargo bay holds eight. The city holds thousands. Whatever you carry to the surface goes into the archive, and the archive is what the world will call the truth about this place.
Genre
Hand painted narrative salvage
A dive
20 to 40 minutes, no save inside
Cargo
8 slots, permanent, never upgraded
Combat
None. The dark is the only threat
Engine
Godot 4, four people, Porto
"The salvor shall not be held responsible for what the city is remembered as. The salvor shall only be held responsible for what the salvor brought up.
"Salvor's licence
The rule that makes it a game
Nothing in Vellamar respawns and nothing waits. The lamp battery is the only clock you have, and light is finite in a way air never is here. When the lamp dies you are not killed, you are simply left in the dark with whatever you were holding, and the dive ends where it ends. There is no inventory management, no dropping something at the airlock to sneak a ninth object past the rules. Eight is eight. That constraint is the entire design, and every other system exists to make it hurt.
The descent
You go down alone, lamp first, past the spires and into water nobody has surveyed since the night it happened.
The facade
Windows still hold light where a battery somewhere refuses to die. Those rooms are always worth opening.
The playback
Touch an object and it gives you one memory. Only one, only once, and only while your lamp still holds.
The choice
Five of eight, and three floors left. This is the actual game, and it is where every dive quietly falls apart.
There is no completionist route. The developers have said flatly that a hundred percent archive is not reachable and will never be patched in. Saltbound is finished when you decide it is.
You have one slot left and four floors unopened. What do you raise?
"We built the cargo bay small on the first prototype because we ran out of time to make it bigger. Then we played it, and realised the bug was the game.
"Aurelia Sant
Saltbound is a fictional game invented as a Slatesource showcase. Halfmast Games, Vellamar and every person named here are made up, the artwork is procedurally generated placeholder, and saltbound.game is not a real site. Nothing on this slate is purchasable and nothing here describes a real product.