Choo-Choo Charles Review (Spectre)
This isn't necessarily a bad game, but it isn't necessarily a good game either. There are a number of design decisions that make playing the game tedious more than terrifying and tense - which I assume is what they're going for.
The game plays the concept fairly straight - there's little attention drawn to the fact that there is an inherent goofiness in the design of a train with a creepy face and spider legs. The non-train enemies (humans in masks resembling Charles) are likewise a funny concept, but not much is drawn from their presence, beyond stealth sections which are more tedious than anything. Whilst not in the train, the player has no weapons or ways to defend themselves, meaning that any failed stealth attempts are best solved by running back to the train to your gun, or even out of the area entirely if you left your train a fair way away.
The side-quests in the game feel like a scatter-shot approach to designs that *could* work in this kind of game, but they're mostly unique in their designs. Some of them, including one in a swamp, and one seemingly inspired by Slender are the worst offenders of the poor design - with these two quests alone being responsible for the majority of the deaths in my play session. In the first, the player is made to enter the water of the swamp to retrieve something as part of a side quest, but they will be chased by a creature within the lake. The problem comes from the fact that the only cues which indicate how close the swamp creature is are the splashes (both visual and auditory). However both of these get lost easily in the player's own movement, which likewise generates the splashing cues.
The second of the two quests has the player run around a gorge collecting 8 pages with children's scribbling - only they're being chased by a ghost which seems to move faster than the player, and when caught, will teleport the player to the outskirts of the quest area - which is frustrating, but more frustrating is that it can also teleport you directly next to Charles, away from the player's train, and away from anywhere to take shelter.
The game is very generous with its currency - the scrap that you use to upgrade your train. If you do all of the side quests, collecting scrap quickly becomes irrelevant - once you reach level 10 in each of the Train's attributes (speed, damage, armour), the only thing left to spend your scrap on is repairs.
There's a really good feature with the map - it seems to generate a real-time view of the low LOD map - and you can zoom right in to and see what certain structures are. There's a fair amount of good ideas in here that maybe aren't quite executed as well as they could be.