A small airship trading simulation game about exploration, making money, and building a trading company.
Imma be honest, this one might not be for everyone, the gameplay loop does become a little grindy at times, and sometimes it takes a bit of clicking around to figure out what to do, but it’s the kind of game that I can play on the steam deck when my computer is busted and I’m too exhausted to get out of bed, and so on.
You play as a trader with a little airship in a steampunky arabian inspired culture of floating islands in the sky. The main objective at the start is to make enough money to sustain yourself and your trading company. Refuel your airship at the power station, and buy some goods from the shops, and then fly off to another island where the prices are higher so that you can sell for a profit. The various shops and merchants restock on different days of the week, and at the end of a week you’ll have to pay for upkeep, but fortunately, time only progresses when you’re actually moving, or holding the button to wait in place. Taking off from an island advances time by 1 day too, so keep that in mind when you land.
Where this game opens up is when you start buying the empty islands. The map is split into two types of islands: settlements, and wilderness. When you land at a wilderness island, you can prospect for a few resources, and later on, spend money to buy the island. Once you own the island, you can build your own little manufacturing settlement on it, building resource gathering sites, warehouses, furnaces, etc, and drop off workers from your crew to man the new settlement and start producing resources.
A sand dune island can gather sand, which then gets smelted into glass and turned into bottles, but then what. All you have is sand, but another island has berries. hmm…
When you go to upgrade your airship, you’re left with 3 options: Either move the new airship to storage (defeats the point of upgrading but bare with me), move your old airship to storage, or sell your old airship to offset the price of the new one. However I’d keep the old one, as you are able to build a special logistics building that lets you designate a route for that airship. Take the glass bottles from the sand island to the berry island, then you can swing by and collect the filled bottles to sell to the highest bidder. It’s definitely an interesting puzzle to solve.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1040070 £12.99
Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/merchant-of-the-skies £11.01
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Merchant-of-the-Skies-1814773.html £13.49
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astralride.mots £6.99 (I can’t verify if this is the same as the PC experience)
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