Railbound

TLDR: The game is technically very competent. But I did not receive the same enjoyment as I did from their first two games. Does that mean I only like easy puzzlers? Was it too long? It's hard to tell. I ultimately will give this a thumb's up, but please read below for the full opinion. This game was played in its entirety on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. There were no bugs or crashes throughout my time with the game. All achievements unlocked at their appropriate times. This is a tough one. I don't know how to review this. To begin with, most of the "essentials" (graphics, animations, sound, music) are very high quality, which is typical from this dev. I cannot find one thing to fault here. The story is as useless and unimportant as it is in their previous two titles. You will forget about it while playing it and never think about it again. The UI gets a slight ding, as it's difficult to know what all of the buttons mean. Why does a wrench mean level editor, but a shovel means credits? I can't find the meaning there... I should also point out that this is the third game (more or less in a row) that I have played from these developers. I mentioned in bo…

Милая мультяшная игра с довольно сложными головоломками. Для тех, кому слишком легко, у каждого задания есть усложнённая версия. Игра хорошо презентует новые механики, даёт несколько задач в одно действие в качестве туториала, потом несколько заданий средней сложности, и пара последних заданий на каждом уровне это максимально заковыристые задачки со всеми механиками сразу. Самый последний паззл ощущается как экзамен на понимание всех механик. Помимо встроенных механик в игре есть разные приёмы для управления поездами. Их нельзя открыть, как способность или механику, только разгадать в задаче. Игра позволяет разобраться самостоятельно и почувствовать себя умным.

I appreciate the difficulty curve of this game, and that I can solve many levels using the constraints of the layout without feeling like I have to figure it all out in my head.

presented as a 2D navigation puzzle but it's actually all about precise scheduling, timing, predicting what will happen when a car flips a switch. fun up to like early world 4 where you can still kind of intuit things instead of needing to count track lengths. would have enjoyed it much more with some kind of timeline visualisation feature. letting the trains run and seeing what tile they crash on offers little help with engineering the correct solution.

Tracks twist across the land Every carriage finds its place Patience brings the journey home

I think this to be the weakest of Afterburns four games that are currently out (Golf Peaks, Inbento, Pup Champs). Where the other games feel like solving a puzzles backwards with deductions based on possible positions, this game feels often very simple or very confusing and frustrating. There is a timing/counting aspect to some of the puzzles, and when the numbers become too high and too spread out to think about, you end up brute forcing your way through the puzzles until it works. One of the levels, you have to put all the tracks in a circle and switch the levers to make a bunch of separate cars do their own loops in a specific sequence that I still don't understand in hindsight. I swear to god I watched a car go in a circle 8 times and somehow that was the solution. Without the timing and counting, it's pretty easy to just lay the tracks in the right spots. There's no way to skip the hard levels and come back either, you just get trapped in these puzzles sometimes, which is bad when they feel like random nonsense. Do I hate difficult puzzles? Am I stupid? Is Railbound objectively less good than afterburns other games? Hopefully someday science will be able to answer these ques…