If you’re into trains and roguelikes then you’re well served at the moment, with gems including Monster Train 2 doing the business in recent months. And that’s on top of a really healthy sim scene that is stacked with rail routes that’ll take you all over the world, whether driving the train or building a complex network of tracks.
The next railroad roguelike to arrive at the proverbial station is Crystal Rail, and it just pulled into Kickstarter Central where it’ll wait for a few weeks before resuming its development journey.
The Kickstarter campaign is off to a solid start and after less than a day it’s already at more than 20%. However, these things don’t fund themselves, and if you like the cut of this one’s jib, I suggest you head over to Steam and download the demo and then see if you’re happy to support the developer, Densetsu Creative, further.
The Crystal Rail Steam Demo
There’s two parts of the demo; one shows of the narrative half of the game, while the other is a more challenging tabletop-inspired experience.
At first I played through the prologue in the story portion of the game, and at times it felt like I was working through a text adventure – there’s a lot of reading and clicking here and there.
I actually got vibes that reminded me a little of 80 Days, a lovely little narrative steam-punk adventure about travelling the world, except here it’s crystal-punk anthropomorphic animals and building trains, and you’re moving between stations in a fantasy world.
There is a lot going on, with busy menus that are brought to life by stylish visuals. I’m always a fan of interesting visual design that tries to do less with more, and Crystal Rail has a watercolour style that’s easy on the eyes. What’s more, there’s a bold colour scheme that brings pop to a game that seems to spend a lot of time in the menus.
The Royale mode is more roguish, and in this portion of the game you’re competing against other animal folk to make the best and most lucrative train over a series of ten rounds.
You do this by visiting several locations on a map, loading and unloading cargo, and so on. At the end of each day there’s a bit of maths to determine who has made what, and then it’s on to the next turn. Every few rounds there are big story events, and you don’t have enough time to do everything.
There’s a real board game feel to proceedings. Every few rounds the weakest link is cut loose, and thus the whole time you’re trying to get a better score than your opponents so you’re not at the foot of the pile come the revolution.
In between rounds you get to tinker with your train, moving compartments around to make things more efficient, and I think this was probably my favourite part of the experience and the bit I look forward to seeing more of in the future.
Even after a few minutes with the demo it was clear that Crystal Rail is a whole lot of game, and I think it has the potential to appeal to anyone who likes a big chonky euro tabletop. There’s a lot to take in and a complex set of systems at work, but I hope the developer can get enough people on board to push the project to the next stop.
