Sky Caravan

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Average Rating:

Sky Caravan is about making airship deliveries in a fantasy world where nobody lives on the surface if they can help it. You have taken out a large loan to escape the surface, and now you need to make enough money to pay it back. Choices affect your ship’s fuel, supplies and morale, which are shown in a display at the top of the screen. Your relationships with different crew members are also affected by your choices, and changes to those values are displayed in a separate window.

This game is an entertaining fusion of choice-based storytelling and resource management. The story was designed with Ink and presented in Unity: You drag and drop tokens that indicate how you want the story to continue, which felt a bit like some games I have played that use Texture.

While I enjoyed the environment of Sky Caravan — there’s a mushroom casino, a Lovecraftian corporate bureaucracy, and encounters with different humanoids that were creative and memorable — it’s an experience that is firmly on rails. You will complete missions in a strictly defined order, and you are not free to explore locations at your own pace.

The variety of Sky Caravan’s choices effectively disguise its limitations. Some choices are reflective, determining how your character feels without changing the story. Other choices might end the game early, but you can quickly reload to your last save point. Having those options makes the list of available choices feel meaningfully larger.

Despite the restrictions of the narrative, players can also make substantial changes to story elements. I found three different endings that all amount to “you defeated the bad guy,” but each one left the player and their crew in notably different circumstances.

Resource management is another aspect of the game that is used as an effective distraction. Your choices collect different amounts of money used to pay off your debt, but there’s a general sense that the gameplay arc will steer you toward a specific outcome regardless of your performance.

If the text alone had been presented without the peripheral animation and status indicators, Sky Caravan would have felt much less interactive. Overall, I didn’t have much freedom to explore the game’s world, but I really enjoyed exploring the stories of its characters.

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