Dust and Salt

I would call this game a fantasy reading simulator with some very basic turn-based combat. It's all very basic, but if you want some written story-driven entertainment this may be for you.

Dust and Salt is about 4 hours worth of play which is worth the full price tag to me even though I got it on sale for $4. I love games like these, choose your own adventure book style games. These type of games leave all of the imigination to you and it can be really awesome at times. There were some points in the game where I did not like the forced choices the character made, but I can understand how difficult it is to develop a game with total choice for the player. The combat is meh. Its OK. Not amazing, but not terrible. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes choose your own adventure type games. Even though this game is about 4 hours for a playthrough, it was an incredibly fun 4 hours to me.

I give a positive score since fans of gamebooks should be pleased with this game, especially if they buy it at a sale price. It's a fairly pleasant, casual experience, but it has a lot of problems. Ideally, I would give a "mixed opinion, 5/10" rate. There is a lot of game-breaking bugs. Bugs that force you to replay parts of the game or turn it off and on to see if they magically fixed themselves. There are design failures as well - most of the choices that you can make, for example, can either reward you or punish you, and while sometimes you can use your own brain to judge the situation and choose the best solution, very often you will feel as if you've encountered a newbie trap - instadeath, load and play again. And the game is not fluent enough (since you can't skip the known encounters after loading) to encourage this backtracking. The battles are very basic, seemingly aimed toward phone users. During the final encounter you can actually win just by using a ship and a balista which you got earlier on, without moving a single group of soldiers. Did nobody test it? The graphics are limited - what IS in the game looks good, but it's definitely a text-based game, not a visual one. The music is fine, but repetitive and limited to a couple of tracks. So, the elephant in the room. The story sucks. It's a revenge story. It's a power fantasy. It's an entitlement simulator. The only twist here are the spare parts of "edgy" drama - you have nightmares, you encounter a lot of violence and damaged lives, your character feels doubts since it wants to lead a massive army what will result in many deaths. I would like it when I was 14. Now it feels too basic for me. A minor spoiler to a minor sidequest: there is a point in the game when you go to a city and you can't enter a restricted area. However, two gorgeous women (twins) let you in just because. And since you are so cool and manly, after a couple of hours one of them just sleeps with you. After the night, turns out she's a princess! Lucky lucky. Maybe her father will support your cause? Damn it, writers, holy smoke it's so dumb. xD Not to say that there is no merit to the game's writing whatsoever. There is some cute folklore hidden in the game, a mix of cultures and tales. Some characters have distinctive personalities and speech patterns. Tricks used to lead the quests are pretty good - nothing is what it seems like, there are twists, turns and various ways to approach things everywhere. You could say that everything kind of works, yet there is no heart in any of it. There are people who can read hundreds of fantasy novels and they don't care if they are a piece of art or just an entertaining craftsmanship. If you don't care either, you won't be bothered by the shortcomings. So yeah, it's a mixed bag. One of those where the devs put too much effort into making game replayable and not enough into polishing a one-time playthrough, what make me not willing to play anymore after all. ; )

Pretty good choose your adventure game. Only things I disliked was the checkpoint system instead of manually saving and in the climax of the story, things became quite rushed.

Multiple paths have believable and interesting consequences. It really feels like a well developed world. GREAT writing. Do well in the battles or life gets more difficult.

Really compelling gameplay and high production value for the cost and size of team.

amazing game and funny

Pleasant.

Short, simple and fun. Decent replayability with few choices and stats having some major changes in how the game plays out. Could have more text and lore to make it less rushed experience, but it's still not that big of a downside given the general focus seems to be on decisions and the whole "puzzle" which to make where to get the different outcome later.

Not fun ... No easy to control to play