Coming soon

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 game where the sailing is the game rather than the way you get to the game. The demo is single player. There is no multiplayer in it and it makes no network requests.

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, weight is speed, and speed is the difference between outrunning a raider and watching her come alongside. The money and the danger are the same dial.

WHAT YOU LEARN

• Apparent wind: the breeze you actually sail in is the true wind minus your own motion, so it moves and hardens as you go.
  
• The no-go zone: there is a cone around the wind's eye your rig cannot sail into, and getting upwind means tacking across it. The HUD draws the cone for the boat you are in.
  
• 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 the whole first hour.
  
• Clawing off a lee shore, reading a falling barometer, and deciding whether a hold full of contraband is worth what it costs if you are caught.

Somewhere out there a raider is building a reputation at your expense, and she will find you before the demo is over.

HOW IT ENDS

The demo runs until the campaign itself decides you have proven yourself in Home Waters. Roughly thirty to forty-five minutes, earned rather than timed. There is no countdown and nothing is taken away from you mid-voyage. When you clear the bar the game tells you the wider waters have opened, and that is where the demo stops.

Your voyage keeps going after that if you would rather stay out and sail.

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 own hull is. Raider aggression is a separate setting again. Pick before you sail; the world is built to your answer.

WHAT IS IN THE FULL GAME

The Wider Sea and the Legendary Waters. The far isles, a rival who hunts you by name, and the storm-ringed Eye. The pirate campaign, where you fly the black flag and take prizes instead of contracts, with five black-flag hulls and a bounty ladder that ends in somebody coming for you personally. Private room-code multiplayer with friends. Three endings you have to earn three different ways.

NOT IN THIS DEMO

Single player only. The pirate campaign and multiplayer are not in this build. Achievements unlock and show in game, but the demo does not post them to your Steam profile.

THE SMALL PRINT

• Colour-blind modes, a high contrast mode, text scaling, captions and reduced motion.
  
• Three graphics presets that scale down to weak hardware.
  
• Fully translated, interface and subtitles, into every language listed above.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Some content was created with the assistance of generative AI tools: the game's localization into non-English languages, portions of in-game flavour text, and 2D store and marketing art. All localization was reviewed before shipping. All in-game visuals are generated procedurally at runtime from code, all sound effects are synthesised at runtime, and all music is human-composed and licensed under CC BY 4.0. The game performs no AI generation at runtime and connects to no external AI service.