🚂 Nostalgic Train | XSX Review | 7/10 | "A Mystical and Relaxing Walking Simulator" 🚂 #IndieGames #GameDev

Being a person that spends a lot of their time covering video games and the various paraphernalia that comes along with them, sometimes I really like to kick back and let games wash over me. I’d say that every month or so, I actively seek out a new walking simulator, a game that I can casually breeze through, relax and enjoy. Amata Games’ Nostalgic Train coasted into view and – as it was ‘that time’ – I really looked forward to getting in a bottle of wine and spending an evening or so getting lost in its charms.

The game - made in the Unity engine – is a first-person narrative-led adventure that begins with your character arriving at a rural Japanese train station at an unspecified period in the last handful of decades. Having no idea who you are or what your purpose is – you begin to wander through the empty town and come across glowing white orbs that act as connections to various chapters and links to the lives of those that have lived in the village over time.

This – purposefully missing some minor spoilers – pretty much makes up the gameplay, and whilst ambling around a small farming community from orb to orb may seem perfunctory, the simplicity of the game mechanics, combined with the relative brevity of writing, is exactly what kept me engaged with Nostalgic Train until its satisfying end (which takes around 2-3 hours).

As is usual with the genre, I’ll avoid story specifics apart from the fact that the game is split into a series of bite-sized chapters. The audio, though minimalistic in approach – makes up a lot of the atmosphere.

There is no voice work in the game, with the story unfolding through pages of text that you click through. When the music does drift into action, it’s mostly piano-led and melancholic, often dovetailing with how the current chapter is proceeding in a narrative sense. That in itself should be a hint as to the mood of the game, these are tales of hardship, loss and forgiveness.

With all of this said, and the basics of Nostalgic Train laid out, I wanted to focus on what kept drawing me in, the simplicity. As I made my way from orb to orb, the conciseness in the storytelling did a great job of creating a sense of a fractured community with a hidden under-skin via sections that rarely felt weak, and kept up my interest in seeing how everything panned out.

I even – after finishing the main story – completed collecting the notes that were available for reading in the free mode, whereby you can roam the community at your own pace. Not something I would normally do, but I liked the thought of one last wander through Natsugiri before my time with the game was up, glancing at the various areas and buildings that I was now so familiar with.

As much as I personally enjoyed the game, there are some caveats that are mostly budget-related. Being made in the Unity engine – and the fact that this is primarily created for last-gen systems mean that the game runs at 30fps and visually, isn’t particularly electrifying – not a problem for me, but worth mentioning.

Also, you rarely enter buildings, instead, you approach them and the orbs of light trigger and act as narrative links as the text boxes pop up.

Finally, I really wish that there had been an accessible map and that the orbs were always visible without holding down a button. The entire game revolves around moving from one to the next without anything else to do in the game world...so just always have a visible path to avoid tedious moments created by not understanding where to go next and pacing around, occasionally holding down the right trigger in the hope that an orb will be visible in the distance. 

If you are a fan of walking simulators, Nostalgic Train takes a wonderfully different approach in focusing on history and Japanese culture. I really found myself getting hips deep into resolving each chapter, it felt like a visual-novel-lite with a relaxing overtone as I pottered around Natsugiri seeing how each tale unfolded.