Choo Choo Charles is an experience I really, genuinely wish I could recommend more than I do. Had it been a free or Pay What You Want Itch.io experience I might be telling everyone I knew to run off and play it and give Two Star Games as many pageviews and word of mouth connections as they can. But for a $30 steam release, Charles doesn’t have enough meat on its bones and has too many issues for me to in good faith say it’s worth the price of admission.

But I want to start positive because there is a lot to genuinely like here.

Charles strikes just the right balance between the absurd and the horrifying as a monster, skittering around on his spider legs as something between Stephen King’s namesake Charlie the Choo Choo and a creepypasta Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s hard not to love him.

Making trains a central theme, having the player fight him from a train of their own that gets upgraded over the course of the game, was a great choice. It feels like a game built around Charles, not just a horror game where any old monster could play the part of the villain. And you don’t see a lot of train games, so points for originality. And it’s cute that the game over screen says ‘derailed’ instead of ‘you died’ or anything else generic. I like those kinds of touches.

I also enjoyed the shoutouts to other horror titles here and there. I’m a big Stephen King fan so obviously I loved the inherent Dark Tower-ness of Charles from the start, but the Slender sidequest was a fun surprise.

The map design is surprisingly strong. It’s an open world, technically, but you’re going to be on rails, so to speak, for most of it. While you can go in reverse, you can’t turn your train around. And because your weapons are rear-mounted and Charles is a pursuing foe, you’re incredibly vulnerable going backwards. While this is limiting, the mission placement on a forward loop of the island takes you from easy missions to harder ones on a pretty reasonable difficulty curve. The island obviously isn’t made to be explored freely. The dense woods and high hills in the spaces between the tracks would probably prove themselves dull and empty if they could be entered whenever you please, but as a danger zone that Charles could burst out of at any time they remain far more engaging. Meanwhile, NPC quests, both optional and required, lead you to basically all the actual landmarks.

Yeah, it’s an “open world” that you can’t freely explore and wouldn’t find much in if you did, but that’s actually a feature, not a bug.

The thing I think Choo Choo Charles does best, being a horror title, is leveraging your sense of vulnerability. While you can deal enough damage to make the eponymous spider train to leave you alone from your own train, you’re completely defenceless on foot. If he decides to launch an attack when you’re more than a couple of seconds from your train or a place of shelter, you’re dead. There’s no getting around it. But everything you need to finish the game is away from the rails, and the further you are in your loop of the island, the more overland travel NPCs will ask of you.

I think this works great. I’ve played horror games that make you vulnerable all the time, and horror-themed games where you just shoot at monsters. Giving you a weapon that works and then telling you to choose to leave it behind to get anything done ratchets the tension up. You’ll be listening to all the ambient noise and random music cues trying to sort out which ones, if any, signal a looming attack. You’ll be weighing how long it’s been since Charles last came and trying to decide if you’re due to see him before starting a big quest, or even just before you step off for ten seconds to switch tracks.

I was never actually killed by Charles while I was away from my train. Maybe he’s programmed not to give you inescapable encounters, or maybe I just got lucky. But I was always worried he was coming, and that’s a horror game doing its job.

Unfortunately, it’s here that my praises for Choo Choo Charles come to an end.

While the island looks very nice and Charles himself is an inspired bit of visual design, there are some bizarre textures that look like the details were drawn on with markers. Most doors and a lot of your train interior have this look. I imagine it’s a holdover from the early version where NPCs were literal cardboard cutouts, but it looks really out of place among the higher res environments. The lack of mouth movement on the NPCs can also be offputting. There’s a final level of visual polish that just feels like it was missed for these things. Lots of reused assets as well, the same crates of dynamite everywhere.

But the real blight on Charles is its stealth sections where you steal supplies and monster eggs from train-worshipping cultists. These are just bad. They don’t work. Something is broken inside these sections. The enemies’ cone of vision doesn’t feel clear and you have no indication of it. The guards on patrol will whistle while they walk around, meant to give you an audio cue to approach cautiously, but their visual range is far further than their audio one. I would scale a hill and get my first glimpse of a camp, but instead of having the chance to scope things out and plan my approach I would be immediately spotted by a goon in the middle of it. Or I’m in a mine or cave and there’s a long hall. I can’t hear whistling, so I assume it’s just the route to next area, but as soon as I break cover a cultist appears at the far end of the passage and yells “No trespassing!” without giving me a chance to double back.

And there’s no recourse when this happens either. You can’t break line of sight and hide in a cupboard or a cardboard box to reset the scenario. Can’t throw rocks to mislead the cultists. You’re barehanded off your train and they have shotguns so you can’t stand and fight. The only thing you can do is lead your pursuer on a merry chase back to your train, waste them with the weapons meant for Charles, and trudge back to the now unguarded stealth area.

These sections were, without exception, miserable experiences. And they make up the half of the gameplay that isn’t chugging along the tracks and fighting Charles.

There could be decent gameplay in here, if you finetuned the mechanics for being spotted and gave the player some more options to finesse their way through like dedicated stealth titles have. Or maybe you give the player a gun of their own that works on cultists but not on Charles. Make it one hit kills and maybe say that the sound of gunshots draws Charles attention to incentivise staying hidden and being efficient. Just add something to these sections to make them feel complete.

And finally there’s the length. I have three hours of playtime on Choo Choo Charles and it was enough for 100% completion. On a $30 game. I spent less on a ticket to Avatar and got entertained for longer. I really hate to say something as harsh as this to an indie title and obvious passion project, but it’s just bad value. Sales and future price drops might help the game fill its niche as a short, novelty impulse purchase, but I couldn’t tell a friend to pay full price for something with such little meat on its bones, that feels so unfinished in places, and feel like I’d given them sound advice.

I really don’t want to be too mean to Two Star Games and Choo Choo Charles. For what I understand to be basically a one-man show, the game is a truly impressive effort with a lot of good ideas that work well when they do actually work. I would love to see what the mind behind this game can do with a little more experience, a slightly larger team, more time to polish and a chance to iterate. There’s a great game at the heart of Choo Choo Charles, but as it stands, only half of that game gets to show. Luckily, I’ve got a soft spot for indie projects and find ambition incredibly endearing. Even if I wouldn’t recommend paying full price for Charles, I’m going to be waiting and watching with great interest for what Two Star has in store next.