Every time I talk to somebody about The Salt Keep, I find myself a little uncertain as to how to describe it. It’s not so much that it’s hard to explain – I think it’s conceptually pretty straightforward, really – but that the standard genre descriptors people tend to use carry so many connotations. Every time I mention a genre, I start to think about what it would suggest to me, and overthink (futilely, of course) what it suggests to other people. 

Text Adventure

When I first started working on this game, I thought of it as a text adventure. That still makes a lot of sense to me, as most of the actual action of the gameplay follows the patterns of adventure games, both text-based and point and click. You spend a lot of time collecting items in an improbably spacious inventory and thinking about where they might be useful. Sounds like adventure to me, and there’s a whole lot of text, so there you go. 

I was concerned that “text adventure” conjured images of parser games, though. I thought that people would either be uninterested in that, or interested but then disappointed when they played it and found that it was not, in fact, Thy Dungeonman. The narrative density made me start thinking about in terms of another genre:

Interactive Fiction

This label makes a lot of sense to me, given that I’ve always thought of this project as narrative before anything else. Some games are just gameplay with story elements added, but this definitely leans more in the direction of a story with gameplay elements added. There are plenty of interactive fiction titles that are primarily or exclusively text based, so it seems like a good fit.

Even this one leaves me a little hesitant, though, because I feel like it downplays the actual gameplay. An essential part of the design here are the character stats, supported by the leveling system and equippable items. They exist primarily to introduce variability into the narrative, but they’re still distinct RPG mechanics. I’ve seen RPG mechanics in plenty of titles people would describe as “interactive fiction” as well, but it’s still generally not what I think of first.

Not only that, but at first glance, a lot of people seem to arrive at a different genre:

Choose Your Own Adventure

Despite the similarities, classic gamebooks or 90s-style Choose Your Own Adventure titles were actually not part of the thinking behind the design of this game. The basic mechanics of choosing paths to take via buttons (as opposed to, say, parser inputs) definitely calls them to mind, though. Even the semi-traditional medieval setting and horror genre fit well.

I initially resisted any Choose Your Own Adventure labeling, because I feel like it implies something almost childish, or built around nostalgia, which is not at all what I’m trying to capture. I do not want to Remember The 90s, nor do I want to help anybody else do so. Like interactive fiction, I’m also concerned that it downplays the gameplay elements, particularly in terms of how the gameplay relates to physical space. You aren’t following a character through branching story beats, after all, but freely navigating discrete locations that are described to you through text, like a DM would explain the surroundings in D&D.

All of that said, it probably does communicate the basic feel of playing very well. As a way to kind of mesh all of those ideas together, I started calling it:

Text RPG

This label felt like a good compromise to me. I think a big part of what draws me to it is the simplicity – it is text, it is an RPG, what more do you want? – and the lack of negative connotations. It doesn’t particularly lead you astray, I think. That said, I’m not sure it leads you in the right direction, either, or really anywhere in particular. When I think “text RPG,” there is no particular game or format that comes to mind.

That could be a good thing, allowing players to approach the game without too many preconceptions. On the other hand, it could be a bad thing, making it so potential players who see the game with no idea what they’re looking at don’t have any quick clues as to how it would feel to play it. Maybe those preconceptions are very important. Who knows?

When it comes down to it, this game, like every game, is:

A Bunch of Stuff

I think I get more hung up on these genre labels than I should. Ideally, it’s a quick way to communicate the content and feel of a game, but perhaps that isn’t how things tend to work in practice. The game draws inspiration from a lot of different sources in a lot of different genres, and it’s probably not possible (or maybe even desirable) to simplify that. 

It seems that the best thing I can do, then, is what I've done here: try to talk about all of them.