Salt Pilgrim: Water Returned

Salt Pilgrim: The Water Returned is a 1-bit text RPG where the whole world is one folder tree.

On a screen modeled on an old DOS file manager, you enter folders to travel, delete files to fight, and talk to the people who live in them. In Tuzkum, where the water came back after a thousand years, caravans, prices, factions and wars run on their own, with or without you.

TUZKUM, THE LAND WHERE THE WATER CAME BACK

A generation ago, water returned to a sea that had lain dry for a thousand years. The water runs clear, but the world is still unsettled. Tribes quarrel over new pastures and waterways, robbers haunt the roads, and monsters live in the old ruins and tunnels. You are a pilgrim who has just woken up in a yurt.

PLACES ARE FOLDERS, PEOPLE AND THINGS ARE FILES

• Enter a folder to go there. Delete a monster's file to fight it.

• Permissions (rwx) are the rules. Files with an x attack first, and a boss without w is sealed.

• Cast rm -f to shred and fsck to repair. Spells like chmod and grep reveal hidden folders and strip bosses of their permissions.

• Talk, trade, steal. People remember what you did.

A WORLD THAT KEEPS BUSY WITHOUT YOU

• Caravans come and go and prices rise and fall. More raids mean shortages, and shortages mean unrest.

• Factions feud, go to war and make truces, and every morning the newspaper reports it.

• Settlements are founded, grow and fall into ruin, and you can raise the ruins again.

• Buy a raft, a rowboat or a sailboat and follow the river to the islands and the Bitter Sea. No boat that sailed past the horizon has ever come back.

CRAFTING, FORGING AND DEATH

• Gather materials, process them at workshops, then craft and forge your gear.

• When you die, the screen collapses into a core dump and rewinds you back to your feet. Your bag and half your kese stay behind in a Remains folder.

MADE FOR TOUCH

• Swipe or drag up and down to move the cursor. Swipe right to enter, left to go back.

• Double-tap any empty spot to run the highlighted file.

• Plays in portrait or landscape, with adjustable text size.

• Fully playable in English and Korean.

One purchase. No ads, no in-app purchases, no account, no tracking. Plays offline.

Latin font: PxPlus IBM VGA 8x16 by VileR (int10h.org), CC BY-SA 4.0

Korean font: NeoDunggeunmo by Eunbin Jeong, SIL Open Font License 1.1

Tiles: Urizen OneBit by vurmux, CC0