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I'm not very good at puzzle games, but in Station to Station that doesn't seem to matter. I might usually tap out once the going got tough and my brain struggles to keep up, but this game has proved to be the exception to that rule. As it turns out, all it takes to turn me into the world's most passionate puzzler is to base the whole thing around steam trains.
As a child, I was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, and while I haven't checked in on the Fat Controller and friends for some time, a childlike wonder for steam trains has never really left me. So Station to Station, a game that takes the ideals of the wooden train sets I played with when I was younger and tasks you with completing locomotive-based challenges, almost feels tailor-made for me.
Full steam ahead
Presented with an almost empty landscape at the start of each puzzle, your goal is to use your railway to build up the surrounding area, connecting industry and population until you have a thriving railway landscape operating in front of you. Each track connects different interdependent businesses together - the lumber yard to the sawmill to the furniture maker, for example - generating revenue as each station gets the resources it needs to grow. That money allows the rest of the region to develop, spawning new locations to link to your railway network.
As puzzles progress, those networks, and the demands placed on them, get ever more complex. You can earn extra money through multiplicative increases in revenue called 'stack bonuses' by finally linking up several businesses at once with a single piece of track. Natural barriers like hills and mountains require bridges and crossroads to get around. Cities are interlinked by passenger lines that can't carry heavy freight, and tracks must be carefully threaded around one another.
At the heart of Station to Station is the need to conserve money. Each station costs a certain amount to place, and each line gets more expensive the longer it grows. Bridges are a massive extra expense, tasking you with finding alternative ways up hills or around pre-existing lines if you want to keep your hard-earned pennies. A card system lets you make more intricate decisions about how to save that cash - as you progress through a level, you'll be given access to cards that might cut the cost of an extra-long line in half if used at the right time. They might let you place a 'Mixed' line capable of carrying both passengers and freight, or let you create a crossroad to get across a track, or a funicular railway to get up a mountain more easily. The cards can be a little prescriptive, but there's usually enough variation in a level to let you make your own choice about how to use them.
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Making the best possible use of the cards is usually key to the part of Station to Station that genuinely surprised me in its ability to keep me playing. Each puzzle is solved by generating enough money to connect every settlement, but you'll get a bonus for finishing the level with a certain amount of remaining cash. That means being careful with every rail and sleeper that you place, curving around hills and positioning every station in exactly the right place, picking the perfect time to use each card.
There are also specific tasks, like making sure not to cut down any trees in a forest level, or making sure to get a certain number of stack bonuses. There's an intricacy to it all that matches the feeling of playing with an actual train set - Station to Station might be a lot more freeform on its surface, but in the end, it only offers you a handful of pieces to use if you want to make the most of it, and I think that's what's kept me chasing those optional puzzles and challenges. Couple that feeling with the adorable and deceptively detailed voxel art that brings each different locomotive quietly and playfully to life, and perhaps it's no surprise that this has become the one puzzle game to try pull me in - it's the one I've been waiting nearly 30 years for, ever since my first trip to the Island of Sodor.
Station to Station is out now on PC. To see what else we've been enjoying this year, check out our Indie Spotlight series.
