I've only played Salem for a short time, and I have just loved everything about the game. I was making a little progress each day, achieving more and feeling accomplished. This was the was the case until the rats came.
I'm sorry to come a bellyache but the moment I realize I was playing the game and it felt like chore It became clear this is problem. Do you know what I do now? I walk out, I get bit by one of the many, many, MANY countless rats that swarm the map, that can all instantly infect you with a single bite, all the time, with 100%. You can outrun the rats, but heaven forbid if something gets in your way, or you try to stomp and miss, because they'll cover the missing ground and bite you. Once infected, and trust me your gonna get infected, I haven't had moment rests between bites and cures of said bites. So once you do that you have to spend a few hours searching for enough leeches, looking at all the swamps near to you, and hopefully it won't take long for you to get cure. Once cured, the logical thing to do is stock up on medicine, so I go search for more leeches in the same swamp to always encounter more rats over and over again. It's been nothing but vicious cycle of me getting bitten, cured, trying to prepare myself only to get bitten and infected yet again.
This is NOT Fun. Salem is a game first, because nobody would want to play a completely true simulation of the real deal. I'm fine with viper poison, because the worse I get is knocked out, and getting a cure for poison is easy, not to mention there are only few vipers here and there. I like a lot of the mechanics, even if things slow me down they have never reached a point where I've come to state of zero progress. There needs to be something done to make this feel more comfortable, like add a bed in the game and I can just sleep off the illness, have my character in bed, wait four hours and get rid of it that way. Make it rats have chance to infect rather then always infect on hit, and also make less rats, or atleast have some of other animals attack them (Like those giant spiders I see). Just something to give me a chance to keep playing.