Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗The Hearth and Harbour
Saltstone Studios · Published by Fellow Traveller · Official site ↗
Content notice: Contains themes of war, the player character smokes.
Last updated 27 Sept 2026
Transform a run-down restaurant and build a new life for yourself in this management RPG. Decide what kind of restaurant you want to create and what kind of person you want to be. As a storm brews outside, every choice you make has consequences.
Adventure, RPG, Simulation · 2026 · More free games
Embark on a journey to revitalize a dilapidated eatery and forge your path in this 2026 adventure from Saltstone Studios, blending RPG and simulation elements. Every decision you make will impact the storm brewing outside and define who you become.
About this game
You have left your life and home country behind, travelling north across the sea in pursuit of your dreams and the hope of avoiding the shadow of an impending war.
And so, you find yourself in the harbour city of Lewthport, the proud owner of ‘The Silver Spoon’, a run-down restaurant in a run-down part of town.
Now it’s up to you to make your dream a reality. With a hefty loan to repay, you’ll need to improve the restaurant quickly… expand the menu, upgrade the decor, build connections with suppliers and keep your customers happy.
Meanwhile, a storm is brewing outside. The choices you make will shape the future of both the restaurant and the community around it.
The Silver Spoon has seen better days. It will be up to you revive it, and give it a new identity.
Design the layout, choose the furniture and decor, purchase ingredients and curate the menu to create the kind of place you want to run, and the kind of community you wish to attract.
A greasy spoon for the working locals, fuelled by favours?
An exotic bistro, that wins favour with its atmosphere, and experimental menus?
A gourmet restaurant, that chases tradition and the funds of the upper crust?
The choice is yours!
At Midday the doors open and it’s time for service!
As Maitre’D you’re in the heart of the maelstrom, the difference between success or disaster.
Playing out as a turn-based tactical game, you’ll need to seat customers, take orders, and ensure the food comes out promptly, keeping your guests happy and managing the stress of the staff.
Getting it right means more money in the till and winning favor with your customers.
When you’re not serving the locals, you can explore Lewthport, meeting its inhabitants and discovering more about your new home.
Visit the market in the morning to stock up on ingredients and build relationships with your suppliers or jump on a tram to go to the harbour district to destress. After work, head for a drink and a yarn at the local pub.
The bonds you build and the choices you make will affect both the success of the restaurant and your own standing in the community.
You fled your native Grauberg and the shadow of an impending war, but nowhere is immune from the gathering storm.
The conflict between your old home and its neighbours threatens to spill out across the region, dragging your new home into the very war you had hoped to escape.
Despite the times, your loan repayments are still due. Every week.
Every choice you make will have ripple effects, from the very beginning of the game as you choose your character’s backstory.
The relationships you build with market vendors will determine what ingredients and recipes you have access to, and what kind of menu you can create. Your menu will alter which characters you will meet and which stories you will be part of.
The choices you make in those stories will impact your reputation, the relationships you build, and what happens to the people around you. It is not enough to simply keep your business afloat. You must embed yourself with the community to survive what’s to come.
Set in the same world as The Pale Beyond, The Hearth & Harbour takes place in an alternate world, inspired by Europe at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a time of great change and industry, of radical ideas about class, the beginning of the end for the old ways and institutions, and growing tensions both between and within countries.
You’ll meet an expansive cast of characters who bring this world to life as you try to find your place within it.
ABOUT THE DEVELOPER
Saltstone Studios is located in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their first game was The Pale Beyond, a story-driven survival management game.
The team is interested in exploring novel systems-based narrative games that combine the kind of deep choice and consequence narratives you find in interactive fiction, with extensive systems more common from other genres - all designed to bring in-depth worlds and characters to life.
Each title draws direct influences from the complex history of Ireland and Britain, with extensive literary and historical research. Every pixel, sentence, and musical note, is hand crafted in house with care and attention.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 1.2GHz processor (Intel Core i5 and up)
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX10, DX11, DX12 capable.
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 3 GB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Deep Dive - Player Character Design
Previously, I posted a cheeky little video about our player character, Kit Purcell, being hot. I asked if there was interest in a deep dive into their character design and one person said yes, so here we are!Early in the design of The Hearth and Harbour, it was decided that we wanted players to be able to explore the city. The best way to create a sense of place and immerse players in that place, was to let them mosey around and interact with it at their own pace. For this, we needed a controllable character. For that, we needed a character design.Our previous game, The Pale Beyond, had a player character-ish. Players take on the role of Robin Shaw, but we never see Robin or what they look like. They were faceless, genderless – we deliberately obscured their portrait in the crew manifest so that players could project themselves into the character. Once the game came out, this created a lovely unexpected thing in the community – people designed and made fan art of what they imagined their version of Shaw to look like. (Shawsonas!) They’d roleplayed so hard they had created an image of their own Robin Shaw in their heads. The range of different Shaws was amazing!Shaw’s portrait in Pale (the coat varied depending on which background culture the player chose)This was wonderful, and not something I wanted to jeopardise in this next game by creating a boilerplate ‘guy’ they were forced to use (foreshadowing is a literary device). So, I started by looking at customisation. I wanted to figure out what was important for players to feel represented, and also what was useful for role-playing and world-building in the character. At this point we knew the player ran a restaurant, and the design had to be reasonable to hand-animate in 8 directions so they could navigate an isometric environment and not break our art style, but everything else felt flexible.Started with body types, and started to explore hairstyles / presentation!I thought about how we handled character creation i...Read full article on Community Announcements (Fellow Traveller Ben K)AnnouncementsOfficial
Designing a City’s Worth of Characters
I’m Katie, character and prop artist \ at Saltstone Studios.Creating The Hearth and Harbour has pitted our team against one of game dev’s many challenges: how to create a city that feels alive and real. Moreso, how do we do this with a tiny team? Our game is set in a fictional city and for it to feel believable, we need a cast of characters that are distinct, purposeful and connected without exceeding the limits of our time and resources.Big cast. Lively City. Small team. How do we do this wtf????Some of the first early character sketches by Katie Noble, figuring out what the average citizen of Lewthport may look like1: So… How many characters is ‘enough’?We must balance scale and feasibility. Too few characters = empty barren cityToo many characters = unmanageable developmentOur solution is perceived density as opposed to raw quantity! Not every citizen we see needs equally deep storylines or complex systems. Instead, we prioritise:A core cast w/ depth and narrative weight \A supporting cast that reinforces the world through presence and interaction \Background characters that add ‘body’ through their presence throughout the city and association with other characters \Layering these categories means we can make the city feel lively without needing each character to carry equal weight and complexity.More Katie sketches, first version of a chef character, and a cat for the player2: Functional Roles vs Social IdentitiesWe want our city and cast to feel diverse and distinct. Each district (or neighbourhood) carries its own identity; encompassing cultural tone, economic status and social dynamic. This allows us to reuse visual motifs and narrative context to associate characters with districts of Lewthport. Each has its own architecture, fashion and social norms, but not all individuals will conform… Some will embrace their environment, others will push against it. (The characters are shaped by where they live but not fully defined by it!!) This grounds characters in a ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Fellow Traveller Ben K)AnnouncementsOfficial
Paper Prototypes
Ethan, our environment artist, is here to talk to you about the time he made a paper prototype to help design the game loop before the game existed in-engine. Take it away, Ethan…Ethan:If I’m making a video game, why on Earth did I make a board game? Good question! I’m Ethan, environment artist, but also game designer for ‘The Pale Beyond’ and ‘The Hearth & Harbour’. I started out small with game design, making my own tabletop and card games with my friends. As an artist first, I was just excited to draw cool stuff that could become a game with little more than a printer and a table to play on. I’ve actually been making games like this for years as passion projects and game jams and I found many, many dos and don’ts along the way. Early on in production for The Hearth & Harbour, I suggested we could make a paper prototype -a board game version of our game’s restaurant gameplay, just to see if we could sit down and play some turn based strategy before we committed big development time. Remembering many conversations with James and Thomas, friends and family all who had worked in the service industry at one time or another, there were some common themes of stress, patience and time management. Can you still keep customers happy in a stressful environment?So much of what we’ve landed on with the game was originally sketched out in this paper prototype, having two characters, the waiter and the cook, seating tables and cooking meals gaining and managing stress all the while. The team were down for me making it, so I gathered together some of our early concept art and got into the weeds.Boy I had created a monster, Katie and I played the first version together and yes, I nailed the stressful experience for sure -but I forgot to put in anything to reward the player or relieve the stress. The next draft was when it finally clicked for me, I got to create some rewards, trim down some complicated steps and reduce the cost of some actions. As I taught the team how to play...Read full article on Community Announcements (Fellow Traveller Ben K)AnnouncementsOfficial
The Hearth & Harbour in the Cozy Job Simulators Sale!
We're pleased to let you know that The Hearth & Harbour is featured in the Cozy Job Simulators Sale! Featuring games about running shops and serving food to fishing, farming, cleaning, crafting, and restocking, there's plenty of titles both released and upcoming for you to explore.With The Hearth & Harbour set with the backdrop of an oncoming war, it's a little different kind of cozy - dark cozy, anyone? Nonetheless, you'll still get to cook up delicious food and meet your community as you shop, serve and pay the bills.Don't forget to wishlist The Hearth & Harbour to keep up to date with the latest news:Read full article on Community Announcements (Fellow Traveller Ben K)AnnouncementsOfficial
An interview with Saltstone Studios about The Hearth & Harbour
The tables are set, the stove is roaring, and service is about to begin! Your seat at The Silver Spoon awaits you in The Hearth & Harbour, the upcoming story-driven management RPG from Saltstone Studios, the developers behind The Pale Beyond.In case you missed it, the team recently presented a closer look at the game during The Story Rich Showcase with an updated video here. We had the chance to speak with James Bruce (Creative Direction, Audio Direction & Original Score Composition), Jessica Campbell (Artistic Direction, Additional Animation & Character Artwork), and Thomas Hislop (Production Support, Programming, UX Development & Additional Narrative Design) to dish up even more details about the upcoming game.Fellow Traveller: Hey Saltstone Studios, it’s great to have you all with us! Firstly, can you tell us how the idea for The Hearth & Harbour came together?Thomas: Our first game, The Pale Beyond, was predominantly based on Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic endurance expedition. The interesting thing is that the whole crew survived against all odds, only to miss the first half of World War I, come home, and immediately sign up and die in a trench for no good reason at all.We thought it’d be interesting to explore this idea: a game set during a war, focusing on what happens to civilian populations and the effects on just the everyday person, in this case, the owner of a restaurant.James: Experiencing the war through their eyes makes for some interesting game mechanics as well. The availability and price of things change, rationing is enforced, and attitudes about the conflict and the politics evolve.FT: It’s no secret that running a restaurant in real life takes a lot of work and dedication. How have you translated that experience into the game?James: The people working at the restaurants are one of the most important aspects of the experience. Finding ways to make the ‘people’ bit of hospitality at the forefront of the game was really important to The Hearth & Harb...Read full article on Community Announcements (Fellow Traveller Ben K)
