Loco Motive

Twenty minutes into a locked compartment aboard the Reuss Express, I had rubbed every item in my inventory against every other item, convinced the solution was something I was carrying. It wasn't. It was a sentence I had never bothered to say to a man two carriages back, and the second I said it the scene came apart with a punchline attached. That is the rhythm of this whole game. The puzzles are rarely about objects. They are about people, and about noticing that the ridiculous thing a character said forty minutes ago was load-bearing. Someone is dead on a luxury train, the doors are shut, and you are on the list of suspects. Robust Games released this in November 2024 with Chucklefish behind it, and the smartest structural decision they made was refusing to give you a single detective. You rotate between three playable characters across the story: a jittery lawyer well out of his depth, a private investigator with far more swagger than skill, and a woman who is playing a much longer game than she admits. Chapters hand off between them, so a throwaway detail you overheard in one perspective becomes leverage in another. You are not untangling one mystery so much as watching three people trip over the same one from very different heights, and the comedy comes from how badly each of them misreads what the other two already know. What works is the craft. The pixel art is hand-drawn in the fussy, expressive way that only happens when a small team is actually enjoying itself, and the character animation does a lot of the joke-telling before a line is even delivered. The voice performances are the real headline. A comedy adventure lives or dies on timing, and this cast plays the material like a radio farce, committing to the silly accents and the slow-burn reaction beats instead of winking at them. The score sits back and lets the train do the work, all rattling wheels and small brass flourishes, and I found myself letting scenes idle just to hear rooms breathe. It is also a genuinely kind game to sit with. You can save anytime, there are no death states waiting to punish curiosity, it plays fine with a mouse only or a controller, and the accessibility shelf is stocked properly with adjustable text size, subtitle options and volume separation. Nothing here demands reflexes or punishes you for poking at the wrong thing. The disappointments are the honest ones for the genre. This is a comedy first and a mystery a distant second. If you want a case you actually solve, a game that hands you contradictions and trusts you to name the killer, you will feel the story quietly doing that work on your behalf while you fetch a hat for someone. There is no clue board, no accusation mechanic, no moment where your own deduction is tested. A handful of puzzle solutions also drift into the old adventure-game habit of logic that only makes sense in retrospect, and the middle stretch sags a little as the cast shuffles between the same compartments. It is not a long game either. Two evenings, maybe three if you talk to everyone about everything, which I recommend, because the optional dialogue is where the best writing hides. Some players will find that abrupt. I found it disciplined. A comedy that overstays becomes a chore, and this one knows exactly where its final act ends. It is for people who grew up on the LucasArts and Wadjet Eye school of adventure and have been waiting for something with that timing and that generosity, and for anyone who wants a story-led game that respects an evening rather than colonising a month. It is not for players who want to be outsmarted, or who bounce off broad character comedy and pratfalls. I came out of it grinning at a genre that mostly gets nostalgia instead of new ideas, and that counts for a lot. Nine hundred small hand-placed details on a train nobody had to make this well. Go ride it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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