It’s hard to pick out games that I enjoy and are well streamable from the mass of games available, so I often rely on recommendations. I get these from you, via short videos on Instagram or TikTok, or sometimes from other streamers. One game that seems to have suddenly experienced a brief hype is “Choo Choo Charles” – a horror game about escaping a monster train. It looked very interesting, so we played it; you can read here whether or not it was worth it.

I’m actually not a big horror game player. I always want to try, but other titles always step in and catch me, because action or puzzles usually interest me more than pure horror. In this case, it was the particular premise that caught my interest: the horror game is mostly about steam engines. Of course, as a fan of the railway, I had to try it out right away.

The game itself is not that complicated to explain. You get handed a small steam locomotive relatively quickly at the beginning, which has three levers: forward, backward, stop. Luckily a train doesn’t need more than that, steering is done by the tracks or by the manually adjustable switches. With this train we now cruise across the island and solve various tasks to break Charles’s curse.

I won’t go into too much detail about the story here if you still want to play the game. However, Charles as the namesake is also depicted relatively prominently on the cover, so he will hardly surprise you as the main antagonist: he is a steam engine with spider legs that attacks us again and again and wants to eat us. To defend ourselves against him, the missions we complete will allow us to upgrade our train and attach better weapons to push Charles back – once done, we’ll have peace of mind for a while to achieve our goals.

Throughout the game we are in the first person perspective, which works very well. The world around us isn’t the most detailed, it reminded me a bit of “Sea of Thieves” in terms of graphics and objects – but that’s not to say it didn’t set the right mood. The sound and light design made Charles’ menacing “Choo Choo” got you nervous and quickly manning the cannon to get ready. All in all I really liked that and the smooth gameplay especially.

All in all it was a rather short pleasure. We completed all the main and side quests within 5 hours, we were just missing a few collectibles to decorate the train. On the one hand I found that a bit of a shame, because the game was really fun, but on the other hand everything was said in time – I think it would have been worse to unnecessarily lengthen the game. I found the boss fight at the end to be quite easy, maybe one could have gotten more out of it – but not so much that finally defeating him didn’t feel earned.

Overall, I have only two points that I would like to criticize at all. For one thing, there were several sneak missions where you had to get past human enemies without them noticing you. I found our perspective and the unclear sight range and angle of the opponents to make this task extremely difficult, it somehow didn’t really fit into the rest of the game. However, the other missions, which consisted of different elements such as climbing, running and parcours, worked very well.

The other point is the weapons available. You could unlock several different types of weapons for your engine to use against Charles. All of them were cool in their own way, but only two of the weapons really did significant damage, so I only used them. A bit better balancing would have left even more choices here.

All in all, my conclusion is very positive though. I was immediately drawn into the game and was able to express my love for trains and my hatred of spider-legged monsters while following a short but interesting story. In my opinion, Charles’ attacks were very well coordinated in terms of frequency and intensity and made the journey through the dark forests exciting. The missions and characters were varied and amazingly deep. It definitely gets my recommendation (if you don’t mind spiders).

How did you like the game? Did you enjoy watching it, do you have any criticisms that I haven’t mentioned, or can’t stand Spiders and prefer to skip the game? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!