Sea of Remnants does something unusual with its protagonist, and everything else in the game follows from that choice. You are not a hero with a hidden past. You are a person who does not know what they are.
You play a puppetfolk sailor. The word matters. Puppetfolk are made — crafted, constructed, assembled — and the game never fully explains what that makes you or what you were before. What it establishes plainly is the starting condition: you are adrift on the sea with no memories, and your reason for sailing is to recover them.
That premise is doing structural work rather than decorative work. A protagonist who cannot remember has no reason to trust anything they are told, which makes the game's companion relationships — recruited from factions that would be their enemies — into something other than a party-building menu. It also gives the open world a purpose that exploration itself would not supply: every island is potentially a piece of your own history, and every faction has its own account of what happened.
Orbtopia is the pirate city, and it is where you begin and return to. Its importance is that it is shaped by your choices — the game describes it as an evolving city that you shape through the decisions you make. This is the anchoring system for a game that is otherwise extremely open: Orbtopia is where progress accumulates, where companions gather, and where the state of the world reflects the state of your playthrough.
The sea is not a map backdrop — it is the primary space of the game, and it is genuinely dangerous. You brave dynamic seas, fight monsters, and take on islands whose rewards are proportionate to their risk. Islands are where you land, fight in turn-based combat, gather resources and find people worth recruiting. The open water between them is where you lose a ship if you are careless about your ship's condition and your crew's readiness.
The official positioning calls it a "visually rich ocean adventure RPG", and the listed tags are unusually specific: meaningful choices, multiple endings, psychological horror, story-rich, character customisation, turn-based combat alongside real-time tactics. The combination of psychological horror with a cosy pirate-adventure surface is the most interesting thing about it — the tone is warmer than the tag list suggests, and that contrast is what most preview coverage has focused on.