A few of this 12 months’s greatest video games boast lots of complexity. Baldur’s Gate 3 is stacked with difficult menus and infinite narrative and fight potentialities; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom provides gamers a litany of how to resolve puzzles due to copious Zonai Gadgets. These video games are amongst my favorites — however they’ve additionally instigated in me an equal and reverse need for simplicity, for video games with slimmer recreation mechanics and extra leisurely play, like Dorfromantik or Unpacking.
Fortunately, the railway builder sim Station to Station nails that simplicity. The sport harnesses the very tactile pleasure of railway placement, and units it in opposition to a fully attractive voxel artwork model. The foundations are easy: Construct stations and lay down tracks between outposts that every require and produce distinct items. Join a mill to a bakery, then loop that each one to a metropolis. As every profitable connection is made, you make slightly cash — which you then spend to put down extra stations and tracks. Longer tracks are costlier, as are tracks that require a bridge (for instance, bridging the hole between two cliff faces.)
The place different laid again technique sim video games would possibly push gamers into higher ranges of complexity, Station to Station delivers on its premise of minimalist ease. Outposts which are important to a different’s manufacturing don’t should be linked sequentially; outposts simply should be linked someplace alongside the identical prepare loop. For instance, your monitor doesn’t have to go from wheat farm to mill to bakery to metropolis. You possibly can as an alternative organize it mill to metropolis to wheat farm to bakery, and also you’d nonetheless beat the extent. Certain, you can make the sport extra difficult by making an attempt to win “stack bonuses” — which award gamers for connecting outposts in a sure order — however I’ve largely prevented doing so, in favor of getting a easy time.
As an alternative, I spend lots of Station to Station playtime merely zoomed in on my trains trucking alongside. You’ll be able to zoom in sufficient to take pleasure in minute particulars of the voxel-style artwork — from the little homes round a metropolis hub, to the voxels comprising timber. The sound design solely aids this sense of calm; laying down tracks is accompanied by a crisp sound, and success comes with a pleasant jingle of earned cash. It’s a deeply nice time, excellent for decompressing or reaching a circulation state whereas watching trains glide by.