Sky High Holdings

You start with four hundred dollars and your uncle's van.

There is no business yet and you cannot afford one. Registering one costs between ten and a hundred thousand depending on the trade, and that is before the lease and the shelves, so the first thing you do is earn. Take a job off a ladder of 176 real ones with real median salaries, run delivery jobs, or sell things through the second-hand shop your uncle lets you run for a cut.

Then you buy a shop. Then another. Then you notice you are making the parts for the thing you sell, and the thing that carries it, and the shop it sits in. Then you are buying a country, and after that there is the Moon.

A job is something you play

Turning up pays. Doing it well pays about double. There are 14 minigames behind the job ladder — you set a seam, you assemble a board in the right order, you find the one wrong word on a page, you work a till, you drive the van. Two of them pay more than the rest because two of them are harder, and they pay for accuracy rather than for finishing.

What is in it

176 jobs with real median salaries, from dishwasher to research scientist

17 shops you can walk into and buy from before you can afford to own one

1,038 hand-generated product photographs, on shelves, in rooms

14 minigames, wired to the trades they actually belong to

A car forecourt whose stock changes every month

A record label you can listen to for free and buy into later

A workbench that builds PCs out of real parts

An endgame that goes company, chain, country, Moon, Mars

Bills that arrive every month and never take anything away from you

Bills that do not punish you

That last one is the design position the whole game is built on. Miss the rent and nothing is repossessed — you owe money, the number grows, and eventually somebody you know offers to help. There is no game over, no eviction, and nothing you built is ever taken back.

There are hidden rewards for paying attention and no punishment for missing them. Most of the good things in here are found rather than explained.

There is also a cheat menu at the bottom of the settings, and using it leaves no mark on your save. If you want to see the end of it without playing to the end of it, that is allowed, and nothing is taken away for doing it.

Made by one person

Written, designed and built in evenings. The artwork and the music are made with AI tools, which is disclosed on this page and in the game, because you should know that before you decide rather than after.

Runs on Windows. No installer, no account, no internet needed. Unzip it and double click.