Salem is set in a fantastical New England and offers free form massively multiplayer gameplay in a persistent, mutable and online world. With players taking the roles of intrepid colonists from the Old World seeking to make lives for themselves in the New, Salem provides them with unique crafting, farming and building systems inspired by 17th century alchemy.
That description does not really do it justice so I will try to give you the scope of what we saw when we got the demo. Imagine a creepy, dark, unknown semi-mystical world, like, the old country. Full of vampires, werewolves, spirits and all that we have now stopped believing in. Now imagine that building something in that world creates a pocket of order out of the chaos, civilization, if you will. Adding to that creation, building another wing on the house, building a fence around the land, getting others to settle nearby, farm the land and create more order, more civilization, somehow tames the land and pushes those fantastic creatures outside of your bubble of civilization. In the Civilized areas it’s bright and cheery and as you wander away from that it gets dark and scary. Mundane creatures will spawn in more civilized areas while the dark, fantastic creatures will spawn out in the non-civilized areas.
That, in a nutshell, is sort of what Salem is about. So yes, it is about crafting, but not in the make a hundred items just to sell them, way. Oh, did I mention the permanent death? Well, there’s permanent death in the game. But all is not lost (pun intended)! If your blood meter drops to zero, you’re KOed, if you take more damage, you’re dead. When you create your next character, they are the direct heir to the previous one. So any land that you claimed and built up in the prior lifetime, pass on to your new character. I can hear you gnashing your teeth and pulling out your hair in frustration screaming, "What about all that work and character leveling?!" Well, they haven’t quite worked that part out just yet. It’s still in a sort of pre-alpha or early alpha stage so many things have yet to be set into stone I think.
And yet, I’m still totally fascinated by the game. For example, there’s a fairly simplistic system of morals in the game. While the game itself won’t punishing you for walking up and slaying another player, you will be marked as a killer and a criminal. There are six major crimes recognized by the game’s crime and punishment system - murder, vandalism, trespassing, theft, assault, battery... and witchcraft, which is a whole other paragraph. When you commit a crime a clue is left. Other players can pick up those clues and start tracking you down. For the more serious crimes (murder, battery, vandalism and theft) are summonable. So if you find the offenders home, you can then summon his character to you. If they’re not logged in, you can punish the character to whatever level you see fit (theft, beat down, death), but remember, you too are then committing a crime. Also, you might summon a criminal who is still logged in and they might simply, beat you to death again, on their own land, which you would then need to trespass upon in order to pick up the clue and summon them again. I asked if they had a mass murderer leaderboard, because that seems like something I’d like to be a part of.
