It is an okay game.

It is not to spooky.
But I still had fun playing through the story and grading up my little train.

It is a great game for a single developer. You can still enjoy playing this game but the fun only lasts for a couple of hours.

6/10 - CHOO CHOO

Get goo goo ALU!

Me and my gaming buddy played this game together a year or so ago and it still sticks with me. I download it from time to time just to replay a run. It's such a simple and fun concept, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and it got alot of yelps and laughs out of us. I very much recommend it to horror fans.

Pro tip for doing nightmare run, I saw this from a speedrunner for it, turn down foliage and graphics so you can easily see the scrap on the ground. It makes doing dash grabs and planning stops much easier.

The only thing I would have asked for is maybe an unlock feature after beating hardmode so I can see Charles on the map. I think it would be fun to watch him scuttle around. Either way, I hope they make a sequel one day as I would love to play it.

I was watching the devlogs and really liked the idea of an open world horror game, where you can use a train to move around (I don’t care about the train-enemy that much). There is no separate train mode: you enter the train and continue to control it all in first person by flipping switches. In case you need to switch tracks to change train’s direction, you need to walk out of the train, manually switch the tracks and then come back - this leads to fuller immersion and creepier atmosphere, since you know Charles (the enemy train) might be somewhere nearby. Premise is great, problem is:

• Graphics is disappointing. The trailer looks amazing and sets high expectations, but the dev knows how to make/assemble a great video and the average gameplay (and its visuals) is not at this level.
  
• Map view is slow (drops below 60fps, with lags), even on my RTX 3080 laptop
  
• Enemy (Charles) evading aspect is very weak. Unlike other horror games, where you need to remember the layout of the environment, which hiding spots it has, carefully walk constantly looking around and be prepared to hide … this one felt more random: arrive by train as close to your destination as possible and just hope that Charles won’t arrive:
  
• 70-85% of times, it/Charles will be elsewhere and you’ll simply walk through the mission as if there were no Charles in the game at all. Other times, it will chase you and then it depends on your luck: how far away you are from your train or some building.
  
• Charles AI is very crude: it doesn’t even seem to understand that it can’t enter a building, so it slides around it partially clipping inside
  
• NPC AI is also crude: one second NPC is panicking, the next it is completely calm as if nothing happened
  
• NPC’s themselves are very crude, they don’t at least move mouth while talking, looks very weird. This is probably the only weak part, which is shown on the trailer (and it looks so out of place).
  
• Basically all the tasks are the same: go to X, grab Y, come back (with some little variety like evading enemies and Slenderman)
  
• Everyone’s life is at stake, everyone entrusts you to save them, but of course no one would help unless you do some errands for them - typical game logic
  
• For some reason you can’t pick up enemy guns after killing them, you need to continue luring them towards the train and then kill them using the train gun (yeah, it would be too easy otherwise, but still feels kinda off)
  
• Based on the story, I expected there to be at least two different endings (depending on whether you do an optional “dynamite” task or not) - turns out there isn’t a second one
  
• The story is okish, but incomplete. Some fans try to dig too deep, the reality most likely is that the dev had limited resources and needed to “cut corners” (as he openly said about 3D-modeling)

This game is a solo-dev work, who I congratulate on completing it, but it doesn’t mean I recommend the game. Nevertheless, despite the disadvantages, this is probably not a definite “no” from me. In case you find the idea (open-world horror game, where you travel by train) very appealing and the disadvantages seem bearable, you might like it.
≈5.4 hours to complete