About This Demo

The wind is real. The sea wants to sink you. The note comes due whether you made port or not.

This is Act I of Leeway, an age-of-sail trading sim where the sailing is the game. The demo is single player and plays offline.

WHAT YOU DO

You start in Home Waters owing 2,000 gold on a boat you cannot afford, holding 160.

Buy low at one island, sell high at another, run commissions for harbourmasters, and pay the note down before the interest gets ahead of you. Cargo is weight, and a heavy boat is slow to get going again after every tack. That is the difference between outrunning a raider and watching her come alongside.

WHAT YOU LEARN

• Apparent wind: the breeze you actually sail in moves forward and hardens as she picks up speed.

• The no-go zone: your rig cannot sail into the eye of the wind, so getting upwind means tacking across it.

• Trim, reef and heel: sheeted in too hard in a blow she lies over and stops pulling, and reefing down keeps her driving.

• Leeway: she does not go where she points, and learning the difference is what this demo teaches.

• Clawing off a lee shore, buying a barometer and reading a falling glass, and deciding whether a hold of contraband is worth the risk.

Raiders work these waters, and a full hold is exactly what they are looking for.

HOW IT ENDS

The demo runs until the campaign itself decides you have proven yourself in Home Waters: roughly ten to thirty minutes, earned rather than timed. There is no countdown and nothing is taken away mid-voyage. When that moment comes, an end card offers the full game, and you can keep sailing Home Waters for as long as you like.

HOW HARD YOU WANT IT

Presets from Calm to Intense set how tightly the isles pack, how mean the weather turns, how thick the raiders come and how quick your hull is. Raider aggression is its own setting, and so is Seamanship: at Deckhand the hands trim and reef for you, at Master nobody does.

THE SMALL PRINT

• Achievements unlock and show in game, but the demo does not post them to your Steam profile.

• Colour-blind modes, a high contrast mode, text scaling, captions and reduced motion.

• Low, Medium and High graphics presets.

• Interface translated into every language Steam lists for this game; a few of the newest sailing lessons are still in English.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Leeway's in-game visuals are generated procedurally at runtime from authored code, together with a small number of human-made, credited third-party models and fonts. Its sound effects are synthesised at runtime and its music is human-composed and licensed under CC BY 4.0. The running game does not use generative AI.

Generative AI assisted with the illustrated capsule and background art on this store page, with translating the game's text into every non-English language it ships in, with translating this store page's short description and, where one is provided, its About section, and with some incidental flavour lines. Each translation was reviewed against a per-language glossary.