Railbound review

Following Golf Peaks and Inbento, Afterburn’s latest puzzler is yet another cerebral workout uplifted by thoroughly charming visuals.

The world of Railbound is visually idyllic. It’s a place where a floppy-eared canine conductor works aboard a succession of old-fashioned steam-powered locomotives, ensuring his sole passenger always gets to his destination. Every time you complete one of the game’s 150+ puzzles, you’re treated to a brief cinematic where flumes of cell-shaded haze fill the skies, and the train’s congratulatory horn honk is also proclaimed through the Switch’s HD rumble capability. Every time I hear that jubilant little signal, it’s like taking a swig of happy juice.

Like any good puzzler, Railbound lures you in gradually, making you feel clever by tossing a sequence of confidence-building riddles at you. The goal of each stage is always the same: connect up to four independently-powered passenger carriages to the back of a steam engine. You accomplish this by laying down pieces of track, which automatically curve and create junctions that can be switched before you send the rail cars on their way. But you’re given a restricted number of track pieces.

In execution, Railbound loosely feels a bit like building a meticulously-engineered machine. There’s no interaction once you set the carriages in motion, so watching the automated rail cars lining up behind the cab in a synchronized manner is yet another dopamine-releasing reward. Like many puzzlers, every stage imparts a lesson. Subsequent levels add just enough variation to keep your mind busy, building on the knowledge you just gleaned.

But fiendishly, Railbound’s difficulty soon ramps up. At first, you might need to get just one car to line up behind the engine. But that number escalates quickly. Soon, creating a path for a procession of a quartet of cars rolling along in coordinated unison becomes the goal. Building your train line on a relatively small playfield that’s frequently filled with obstacles might rile you. But realize that Railbound’s relatively small workspace means you won’t have to deal with a convoluted labyrinth of knotted train tracks. Once the solution is grasped, laying down and proper pieces will only take a few seconds. This helps to keep the game’s pace lively.

If the game’s difficulty continued to intensify, there might be a point where would become just too cognitively exhausting. But ingeniously, each new world typically resets the challenge level. The twist is that new worlds also bring in new objects to complicate things. Initially, there are wrap tunnels that are followed by switches that toggle barriers on and off, junctions that automatically switch with each passing cab, and routes that correspond to certain cars. Later, the game combines its contraptions, making for some thorny brainteasers. The upside is that you’ll unlock cute postcards of the conductor and his passenger.

This means that there’s a single solution for each stage and to progress across Railbound’s stage map, you’ll have to beat most puzzles. Fortunately, there’s a shrewd hint system in place to keep players from becoming stuck during the game’s trek. Once turned on, a tap on the left shoulder button will disclose the proper position of a single piece of rail. If that’s not enough of a hint, you can receive up to two additional clues. If you’re still stuck, you can optionally unlock every stage, effectively skipping any puzzles that are too tough.

Railbound is delectably cute and thoroughly challenging. But, like some puzzlers with a narrow premise, it’s not the kind of game you might want to tackle in a single playthrough. The title works best in short spurts, allowing you to contemplate over a difficult stage when you’re not actively playing the game. I’d muse on possible solutions when standing in line at the grocery store or while getting ready for work. If you appreciate puzzlers that you can gradually chip away at or ones that occupy your thoughts when you’re not playing them, consider hopping aboard Railbound.

Railbound was played on Switch with review code provided by the publisher.