Salty Hounds – Basic Guide

Here is just a quick guide to playing it safely while avoiding as many bugs as you can up to the end of Week 3.

Guide to Basics

If you play it safe, it should be enough to take you to the end of whatever amount of content there is available atm. Please note that bugs will be different depending on your operating system, etc. I spent some time testing the game breaking bugs and hopefully that’ll help you avoid them. As long as you stick to the general routine, it should be mostly playable…I think.

General Tips

Buildings that crash – Avoid them. All the others should be mostly fine.

• Winter street: Gym on the very left next to mini mart
• Sunny street: Clinic, Restaurant and UFO Games (All the buildings here, basically)
• Market avenue: Big hotel on left
• Lapis street: Gun Range on right
• Autumn street: Bar

Otherwise, you can mostly explore freely and chat to whoever you want. Characters seem to sometimes spawn in random places whenever you change maps, and though you can’t talk to a lot of them yet, you’d sometimes come across someone you can talk to. Wouldn’t recommend it though since there is so much map to walk across.

BTW there are small arrows beneath the Sunny street middle exits telling you which direction you’re going.

Cutscenes/phone calls are triggered whenever you pass a specific location on the street map, and usually not inside buildings, so you can still access most of the story content.

Don’t

• Don’t let your AP run out. This causes the game to freeze on dialogue box. You can recover AP by sleeping on the interactive benches. such as the one along the riverside. You can then sleep at home when it’s late enough.
• Don’t click on ITEMS button.
• Don’t accidentally hang up calls in the middle of them. Did that by accident and froze the game. Don’t repeatedly press the skip button either–once is enough. Pressing it too many times causes bugs.

Do

• Save often. You can save in Salty Hounds office and with the computer on 2nd floor at home. Autosave is relatively good enough after Week 1, since it saves every time you sleep in bed. Loading is a bit buggy at time but no major issues.
• After first protest scene on sunny street, try using mouse instead of keyboard to move character if keyboard is unresponsive.

Gameplay

Week 0

You start on a Sunday, but there honestly isn’t that much to do on weekends. Explore the streets and figure out where most things are located if you can while avoiding crashing buildings. You’ll come across a few cutscenes. By the time you’re done exploring, it should be evening, and you can go home and sleep to enter WORK PHASE to skip through Mon to Fri.

Week 1-3 and onward

Work phase

This is period where most of the actual story content/events happens other than map cutscenes, at least atm. There will be stat checks–and that’s what you use your weekends for, upgrading stats. You regain full control on Friday night and you get paid then. (You’ll get next to no money at the start.

Weekends

Explore around the map for cutscenes. If you’re not bothered, just head off to increase stats before retiring for the night.

For stats, I suggest passing time by either:

• Cooking at home (but be careful, this uses 20 AP instead of the 10 AP shown).
• Spending time alone on the home sofa to increase random stat. (For some reason, this doesn’t spend AP.
• Read on the Riverside bench in the afternoon, but not before the day gets a bit dark. You’ll lose Wisdom points in the morning.
• Read magazines or economic journals in the left building of Office street. Wisdom/Sense
• Recover AP by sleeping on benches.

In the end, on weekends, I settled into a routine of: Spend time on sofa > explore for cutscenes > reading magazines for free in the rival office building just to spite the guy > going home and going to bed.

You can’t talk to most characters on the map atm (I DID manage to catch a voice dialogue from Noru at one time), and you’re broke, so there’s no point going to a lot of the facilities. I’m sure you’ll start having more options as you get more money and the game receive updates.

The calls and story progression is pretty fun so far. You get to see pretty CG/illustrations too as you progress the Weeks.

Hopefully that helps.