Salvage Crew
Play a free co-op puzzle game online. Dive a sunken ship, free its machines by hand, and read out the plate for a machine on the far side of the wreck.
About Salvage Crew
Salvage Crew is a co-op puzzle game with no riddles to read and nothing to type. You are a hard-hat diver working the wreck of the freighter Kestrel Marne, sat on the seabed with her machinery seized. Freeing one machine is physical: you drag fuses into a rail, turn valve tiles until the bilge line reaches the right outlet, load ballast blocks onto a scale until it balances, patch cables across a switchboard, set a pressure dial. What none of those machines will tell you is what the correct setting actually is.
The shipyard engraved that on a fitter's plate in a different compartment, and the plate in any compartment is never the plate for the machine standing next to it. So somebody swims, somebody reads, and the two of you talk each other through it while the air counts down. Guessing to save the trip is possible and it costs the whole crew twenty seconds, which is longer than the swim. Every clue is a shape, a colour, a count of dots or an angle rather than a word, so the game works just as well with a crew that does not share a first language.
How to Play Salvage Crew
Salvage Crew Rules
- Five machines are seized, one in each compartment of the wreck. The crew shares one air supply, and it belongs to everybody.
- Swim with WASD or the arrow keys, or with the on-screen pad on a phone. Everyone sees everyone move in real time.
- Stand at a machine and press E, or tap the prompt, to work it.
- A job is something you physically manipulate: fuses to seat, valves to rotate, ballast to load, cables to patch, rings to turn.
- A machine never shows you the correct setting. It only shows you the parts.
- The setting is engraved on a fitter's plate, as a picture, and always two compartments away from the machine it explains.
- Read the diagram out loud. Every clue is a shape, a colour, a count of dots or a position on a dial, so no translation is involved.
- Press Engage when you think a job is finished. A wrong call burns twenty seconds of the crew's air.
- Two divers can work the same machine at once. What one of you drags, the other one sees.
- Free all five machines before the air runs out and the whole crew surfaces together. Nobody wins alone.
Tips to Win
- Split up the moment you are down. One diver parked at a plate reading to a partner will always beat two divers wandering the same passage.
- Describe what you see, not what you think it means. "Circle, then bolt, then star" survives a bad connection; "the obvious one" does not.
- The bilge plate only names the live outlet. Routing the valves is your problem, so start turning tiles before anyone tells you how.
- Get the ballast weights read out once and write them down. Asking twice costs more than the arithmetic does.
- Never guess to save a swim. Twenty seconds is longer than crossing the wreck, and the strike hurts everyone.
- On a solo dive you are your own runner, so read the whole plate before you leave it rather than making the trip twice.
Best for
Salvage Crew is for groups who want a co-op game where the difficulty is communication rather than reflexes or vocabulary. It suits friends on a voice call, couples, families with mixed ages, and remote teams looking for an icebreaker with an actual task in it. Because every clue is a picture rather than a sentence, it works for crews who do not share a first language and for players who find word games and trivia unwelcoming. It also plays solo, where it becomes a quieter memory-and-swimming puzzle instead of a shouting match.
Salvage Crew FAQ
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