A small new feature coming in the full version of The Salt Keep is the statistics popover. It's pretty straight-forward: a popover available in the settings menu where you can see various stats keeping track of the things you've done during your current play-through. It keeps track of things like how many times you've passed or failed challenges, how many items you found, how many injuries you've taken, and so on.

I was initially hesitant to include this, because it feels almost out of place in such a narrative-heavy game, as if it somehow undercuts the story-telling to include raw numbers presented in such a mechanical way. On the other hand, I'm always drawn to a stats page. It's usually the first thing I look at in any RPG I play, and I'm disappointed when I don't find one. Beyond that, my first game, The Idle Class, is a text-based idle game, part of a tradition of games like Kittens Game, or Evolve Idle, or Swarm Simulator that are basically nothing more than gigantic interactive stats pages crafted around some kind of theme. I can't resist the numbers.

There's even a word count in there to keep track of how many words you've read during your play-through. It's not really an accurate representation of what you've "read," because you're probably skimming when you come back to things you've already seen, but I still think it's interesting to see how many words have passed by your screen. Meaningful? Probably not. Useful? Definitely not. 

Kind of interesting, though. What better reason is there to include something?