Where Can I Get Salt?

About a month ago I saw a video on Design By Proxy with the note “The founders of Flickr made a MMORPG.” This caught my attention because I love Flickr.

I enjoy video games quite a bit, but I have never gotten into the massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. Despite this, I was quite intrigued by the video for Glitch. The art direction looked wonderful and the video was weird enough to make me wonder what it was really all about. I signed up and was quickly drawn into this quirky game world.

The basic idea is that there are 11 giants and the entire game is taking place inside their imaginations. Your actions help grow and shape the world. I like their “What's Different?” blurb:

For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different.

I rather like the fact that it is not a fighting-centric game. I have no objection to fighting games; it is just a fresh change. The actions and dialogs in the tutorial made me laugh. Water and pet trees? Okay. Milk the butterflies? Okay, but only after massaging them. Obviously. Where do you get meat? Well, pet a pig and then nibble on it a bit. They are glad to provide you with some meat. Squeeze a chicken to get . . . grain.

It is a pretty freeform game. There are skill trees that you can learn to improve abilities like cooking, mining, gardening, or engineering. You are given quests to complete as you progress through the skill trees. The game encourages community and cooperation, another aspect I really like. The visuals are wonderful, too.

Everything about this game is fun. It is probably hard to describe and do it justice, so I recommend you try it out. The best part is that it is free and runs in your browser. Yep, it's Flash-based, and it is quite impressive how well it runs, considering. There might be a short delay after you sign up (I received my confirmation within a couple hours). I do have one invite left, so if you'd like that, be sure to enter your email address along with your comment below. Don't worry; your email address will not be displayed.

P.S. wherecanigetsalt.com