Railway Islands 2 - Puzzle

I have a soft spot for the kind of game you can open at 11 p.m. and close at midnight feeling genuinely calm. Railway Islands 2 is exactly that, at least for its first half. Rising Moon Games - a one-person Brazilian studio - has built a clean, considered hex-grid puzzle around a deceptively simple idea: all the track pieces you need are already on the board, scattered wrong. Your job is to rotate and swap them into a valid route so your train visits every delivery building and exits through the tunnel without incident. No timers, no lives, no noise. Just you, a puzzle, and the sound of a small locomotive doing its rounds. The hex-grid presentation is where the game earns its personality. Each island is rendered in a toy-like isometric view with colours that shift warmly across all four seasons - spring greens giving way to autumn oranges, then snow. The UI is clean and uncluttered: left-click to pick up a tile, click a second tile to swap, scroll-wheel to rotate. It controls entirely with the mouse, which keeps the experience grounded and tactile in a way that suits the pace. Track piece types include straight runs, curves, bridges, crossings, and switches (splitters that redirect the train based on arrival direction), and later levels introduce linked remote-controlled switches and multi-train routing, where two or three trains share the same rails and each must reach its assigned station without colliding. That last layer is where the game's small design ambitions feel most alive. The honest critique is that Railway Islands 2 front-loads most of its ideas. The first twenty or so islands introduce each tile type with a satisfying rhythm - you get the eureka feeling every few levels as the routing logic clicks into place. But once bridges, crossings, and linked switches have all made their appearances, the back half starts recycling combinations rather than finding genuinely new challenges. Community reviewers noted a plateau around the midpoint, and I think they are right: the puzzle box is fully unpacked by level twenty-five, and the remaining fifteen levels feel like practice runs rather than fresh problems. The camera also resets to an awkward default angle each time you restart a run, which is a small but persistent annoyance on larger boards. On the positive side, the Workshop integration is a quiet little gift. A level editor ships in the box, and enough players have shared custom islands that the forty-level base campaign is not really the ceiling. The user-made content varies in quality - achievement hunters publishing quick maps for the badge are a real phenomenon - but the better community puzzles extend the game's lifespan meaningfully. For a sub-five-dollar release from a solo developer, the inclusion of full Workshop support and cloud saves reads as genuine care, not padding. The sound design reinforces that feeling: the clack of tiles sliding into place and the low chug of the train running its route are small pleasures, even if the music itself sits quietly in the background without much to say. Railway Islands 2 knows what it is. It is not trying to out-design Stephen's Sausage Roll or challenge the logic-puzzle ceiling. It is a thirty-to-sixty-minute cozy session game for players who like trains, clean visual design, and the meditative loop of spatial reasoning done at their own pace. The second-half flatness and the camera quirks are real complaints worth knowing about before you sit down. But for a solo developer's quiet sequel, there is enough craft in the isometric presentation and enough genuine challenge in the multi-train levels to justify the ask - especially with Workshop maps waiting on the other side of the credits.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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