Soul Searching leaves you in an open world without any tutorial except telling you the buttons to play. There is no one correct path. There are a number of play styles you can choose, depending on your hunger for gold and better boats. You might get lost, but it won’t take too long to find your way to the end.

You sail on your small primitive boat to a world of islands, dragons, and magic. You can learn about stories of people living on islands you chose to visit, discover dragons, catch fish, customize your boats, find ghosts, cast magic spells, and more.

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series and movies like Life of Pi, Soul Searching is about growing up, leaving your homeland, standing on your own feet. It deals with themes like isolation, searching for meaning and direction, leading to depression and suicidal thoughts.

As the player, you are not a violent hero. The most violent thing you can do in this game is to catch fish to feed yourself. Other than that, it’s a game of humble survival and peaceful travels. But in that humbleness, you are challenged to survive in a world of merciless dragons and endless seas.

Other than the single-player story mode, the game also offers a randomly generated mode from 1 to 4 local players. This offers replay value and requires players to work together to survive. More players, more need for resources, so more challenge, but more skills to survive.

Key Features:

• Single-player mode with a deep and emotional story.
• Random mode for 1 to 4 players that randomly generates a map and requires players to work together to survive.
• Creatures at sea: dragons, killer whales, and more.
• Many islands, some inhabited with lots of people who have intriguing stories to tell.
• Magic skills that let you survive at sea more easily.
• Player appearance customization.
• A day-and-night cycle that affects the gameplay subtly.
• Bonus short stories with an experimental vibe.

Made by a one man team spanning 3 years of development, Soul Searching is a very personal game. It tries exciting story-telling methods to convey feelings rarely conveyed in games. Since all code, art, music, everything is made by one person, it offers a special sense of authorship hard to find in other games.

Soul Searching is currently available for Nintendo Switch.