Voidtrain

It took me a while to finish this game mainly due to other things coming up. I spent around 37hr in the game (way above the How Long to Beat numbers) but that was due to my insatiable need to loot every single item in sight. The game is on Game Pass and was one of those nice surprises as I almost bought it the week before it came out.

The story is kind of vague. You are an engineer that goes to a deep dark forest and while there gets lost. You find a cabin and break in only to find a strange structure and a train cart. After fixing the lights and electricity you throw the switch on the table and a portal opens up in the structure and you, the train and half the items in the cabin are sucked into the portal. You wake up in an endless void on the train cart and so starts your journey through the Void. All the way through this you are being narrated to and spoken to directly by an ethereal narrator. He is predominantly there for comic relief and to explain the story. Think high on life or similar style. He seems to know more about this world and ensures you have an understanding of how things work and what is expected of you. You have a journal that updates with what you are doing next.

The basic loop is you head down the track on the train while collecting items (wood, metal scraps, chemicals and so on). You can float away from the train but are attached to the train by a cord. You can control the speed of the train and can stop it if need be. As you go along you build things on the train. Some make your life easier (like the little creatures that help you collect the floating resources) and others are used to make items you need (worktable and weapon bench for example. There is also a research bench that in order to research things you need to add items you collect along the way to generate science points. Each item adds a certain amount of science points to the reader. You can research better train parts (an engine or storage) or get additional or upgrades of workbenches. 

As you move along the track you come into contact with various different creatures such as floating fish that move through the Void and a large shark like creature that gnaws at your train. There are also instances for you to investigate and the variety of these changes as you progress through the game. There are outposts where you can find snippets of information on what exactly is going on although this continues to remain vague throughout. 

A good gun will help along the way. You start with a revolver that has endless ammo but only has 4 shots before you need to reload. This is also not particularly high in damage. There is also a rifle and shotgun and these have composite parts that can be upgraded and changed out to facilitate different bonuses and effects (ice, fire, secondary fire effects, headshot damage and so on). 

There are also ‘human’ enemies around. They are present at these sites along the way as well as at the depots you pull into. You reach these depots along the rail and as the music swells and gets louder you enter through a door that looks like a triangular doorway into an underground tunnel with Norse runes all over it. The train then hurtles forward and stops at a station. These stations are all different but have similar feels to them. There may be a small depot where you get a snippet of information about the world you are in and there is usually a battle arena with a group of human enemies that fill your inventory with new guns (although they don’t change that much) as well as gun parts to upgrade your weapons and a selection of resources. You then leave the station and enter the loop from the beginning and continue to gain resources.

You go through this loop time and time again and although they are procedural (and there are ways to manipulate to a small degree what you will likely find on the journey), they are filled with similar instances. As you progress and upgrade your train, weapons, armour and backpack you encounter new resources that are needed to upgrade your items further and so on and so forth. This can get tedious but I think that may have been due to my usual instinct to get everything I can and store everything you can in case I may need it. This is not the case and at the end of the game I actually ran through the loop without actually picking up any resources as I had a train full of wood and metals I was never going to use. And yes I am the person at the end of a Final Fantasy game with 999 healing potions and other resources that I never use because you just never know when you are going to need it! But in this game I could have moved through a little quicker and not suffered from that feeling of tedium. 

There are tools you are given to make collecting items in the Void easier such as a grappling hook that magnetically draws items to it if you hold the button and creatures that, as long as you keep their water topped up a their pet bed, will appear in the Void and collect excess items as the train goes along. There are also creatures that can be added to workbenches and other tables on your train that can work there. For instance there is a table that is for farming and if you add one of the creatures to that they will work the farms and grow food for you and themselves. If you add a creature with a farming skill they will increase the yield or speed up the process. But again by the end I had so much food and water and other resources that I was kind of swamped and ran out of storage. There are some very good QoL in the game including craft from chests and store all similar items in the storage that is on that train cart with one button. 

The research is a little strange. There are a few items in the research tree that I found useful but most of it I could have done without. There is a huge amount of customisation of your train, including new carts, items to decorate your cart with, sides on the cart, items for your creatures on the train and so on. Most of it is not useful things but rather research of items that make your train pretty as it is mostly cosmetic. I never even completed the research tree. As I said you use items you find in the Void as well as items you craft to add research points at the research table (each item has different values). You then use those to select research. There are one or two major research items and up to three minor ones per research page. The major items need to be researched in order to move to the next research level. The major items tend to be important new discoveries (new engine type, fuel source, smelter and so on) that you need to move the story on. The minor ones are mainly cosmetic and upgrades to your tools. 

The gameplay loop is fun for a decent while. The upgraded tools and new resources as well as the variety of different encounters and events you come across along the way are entertaining enough to keep you coming back. My personal loot hoarding and need to collect everything did ruin the zen-like nature of the loop between stations or depots as they are called. I could have dialed back on my enthusiasm to have everything and the game would have gone quicker. The story was there but up until the end it was ropey at best. It is not the driving factor but is the reason you are doing what you are doing. The narrator is constantly ensuring that you know where you are going and what to do and this was helpful to ensure you stay on track. If, while driving on the tracks, you come to an important spot in the Void, the train will stop and the narration will let you know what you need to do. 

I really enjoyed the game and it is definitely worth a try. The game isn’t difficult and if you die you just return to the train and carry on. There are a multitude of difficulty options at the beginning to tailor the experience to how you would want to play. The game ran smoothly and I don’t remember any crashes. I never tried a controller so I can speak to how good that is. The ending was OK and as a game it is a solid game but not an amazing game. If you have a spare time slot in between games and are looking for something to play that isn’t too difficult, has some puzzles but nothing that will stretch you and has light combat, then maybe this is for you. I feel if they make a second one they will have learned a lot from this game. My biggest suggestion is don’t get too bogged down in resource collection because there are resources everywhere in the Void and you can take 20min to move between depots and it is unnecessary, especially after the midpoint.

Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on the game yourself or if you know who the narrator was. I cannot find who it was anywhere.