It doesn't seem fair that this wonderfully weird visual novel about alien whales is completely free
I was just minding my own business on a quiet evening when I stumbled across Alpha Beta Gamer's coverage of South Scrimshaw: Part One, a free visual novel that presents a nature documentary about alien whales. I couldn't ignore a premise that good, but I still had all my expectations blown out of the water (pun fully intended).
The real killer for me with South Scrimshaw is its worldbuilding—it nails the Disco Elysium thing of initially appearing very familiar, but then slowly unfurling into a setting that's almost vertigo-inducing in its strangeness. There were several moments in South Scrimshaw that hit me like the whammy of The Pale's reveal in Disco.
One of the earliest (so it's not a big spoiler) is the biology of the «Brillo Whales». They cultivate symbiotic relationships with other ocean species, forming specialized micro-ecosystems in their skin. The whales specialize in their biota, almost like they're picking vocations, and South Scrimshaw presents a dizzying array of uh, I guess «whale RPG classes.»
The protagonist whale's mother, for example, looks like a floating forest, permanently obscured by all the flora that have taken root on her body. Another whale hosts a colony of octopi on its skin, which confer their active camouflage and allow it to be an ambush predator. Still another mimics the skin and pheromones of a species of pack-hunting sharks, letting it become the alpha of the group.
The «Kronos VII» documentary crew who frame the story will break into these digressions about the shocking interplanetary politics and society looming behind the production. There's this surreal «as you already know» frankness applied to keyhole views of what feels like an already extremely well-realized sci-fi setting.
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