Merchant of the Skies (2019)

• Playtime: 10,5 hours

• Played: 2025

• Expectation: Slightly positive based on the Steam screenshots.

Intro

MotS is an extremely basic trading sim. You travel between cities buying/selling goods to gather the capital to get a better ship and eventually buy production locations. There are also some story elements.

The Good

• Very easy to get in to.
• Nice, clean graphical style.
• The skill give a nice sense of progression at first.
• The supernatural elements, like giant talking animals, are kinda interesting.
• Super casual, you would have to go out of your way to lose.

The Bad

• The story elements are barely there.
• Trading is the most basic it can be. There is no supply and demand, cities will always sell and buy the same goods at the same price.
• You can't leave a city by pressing Esc, while it does close every other menu.
• There's no easy way to see if a city has reset its inventory/money.
• Item stack limits seem completely random, not based on size/weight.
• Bringing water to the giant fish is incredibly obnoxious and requires far too many actions.
• Skills are incredibly unbalanced, some are amazing, others pointless.
• Ships need energy to move and this entire system is really annoying at first and becomes completely irrelevant once you get the good ship.
• Processed goods cannot be sold normally, only used in quests/building.

The Ugly

• There is one ship that is clearly the best, it has almost double the speed of the #2, vast energy storage and enough cargo space for all quests. Bizarre.
• Cities all look the same, there are no icons or the like to show the buildings present. You can only see this by hovering over a city. But it still doesn't show all information at once, not even in 4K resolution. So you have to scroll very very slowly, line by line, to see all buildings.
• You have a quest to supply 4 inns constantly. Not only do you have to find the relevant systems as indicated above, they also have a tiny storage capacity.
• Cities/production locations don't show all relevant info at once, you have to scroll sideways and hover over/click on each individual building.
• Performance got noticably worse over time and i had only claimed about 1 in 6 production locations and not set up automated trading.

The Truly Awful

So i finally managed to get a caravan office which allows you to set up automated trading. I set up a simple route, pick up bread from that location, bring it to an inn. Then i remembered the inn also needs apple juice. So i added the relevant location to the route. That's when i saw you cannot change the order in which commands are executed. And i stopped playing. Setting up and maintaining these is expensive and you most likely want to set up a few long routes. But you better get the exact order right or you have to repeat a ton of steps.

Conclusion

This is nice and relaxing at first but the cracks quickly start showing. Despite being the devs third game there are some very glaring flaws. And those giant talking animals and other supernatural things that seem interesting at first turn out to just be very, very basic minigames (mastermind/memory) that give you some money/goods.

Merchant of the Skies isn't going anywhere and the devs don't even know how to get there.