As someone who loves cosy games and also appreciates that trains are super cool, Locomoto could have been the perfect match for me. A fully customisable train and a gentle Animal Crossing-style world is exactly the kind of low stakes fun I’ve been craving recently. However, a few nagging issues have kept Locomoto from reaching the heights of the cosy greats.
Starting Locomoto for the first time, the game has you creating a character from a variety of different animal parts. It’s easy to create a genetically-ambiguous avatar; I ended up with a bear with a beaver tail, and you start with a small selection of clothes to dress them up in too so you’ll find something that suits you.
Soon after, you come into ownership of the all-important train which becomes your mobile home and enables you to see the rest of this laidback world. You live in a town called Barrenpyre which, as the name suggests, is a bit of a desolate wasteland. People there are getting sick, plants aren’t thriving, and it’s generally not a nice place to live. The game has a few different main story threads, but they all tend to tie back to improving the quality of life in Barrenpyre, whether that’s building new boilers for the homes there or getting stuck in with a community clean-up. It’s nothing ground-breaking, but I really liked that this was about as intense as the main story got, which shows just how gentle the rest of the game is. As you work your way through the story, Barrenpyre gradually gets greener and more lively, which is a lovely touch and helps give a sense of progression beyond objectives being ticked off.
Most of the game is spent travelling from station to station, meeting people and completing quests to either improve Barrenpyre, build infrastructure in the three regions of the map, or just help the locals and get to know them. Mechanically, the game is as gentle as its narrative is, with most of the game consisting of variations of fetch quests. Sometimes you’ll need to get a handful of resources for the quest giver, or you’ll need to go find someone and bring them back. It’s very simple stuff, but I still found it enjoyable and played for several lengthy sessions. The characters are cute and cheerful, and there are some nice side stories such as setting up a school or rebuilding a relationship between two feuding friends.
At each station there are usually a handful of things to do: you can pick up mail to take on your journey, help with some recycling, mine for resources, or see who’s waiting on the platform for a ride to another station. Ferrying people across the world is an easy way to meet everyone, and rewards you with tokens you can trade in for various resources. These resources are then used for crafting, and Locomoto has a decent variety of furniture across multiple different aesthetics for you to make. I was thrilled when I unlocked a carriage that had compartments within it, and immediately filled them with a dark wooden interior and art deco furniture, which was a stark contrast to the pink flowery motif in the carriage behind it.
Driving the train itself is unsurprisingly very basic: you just need to keep it topped up with coal from the never-ending supply at the back of the train, select a destination and then press ‘go’. The train moves in real time from station to station, leaving you with time to decorate your carriages, tinker with your layout, or just chat to passengers. It’s a nice time, although I wish the driving was a bit more engaging as sometimes you’ll be making some long journeys that take minutes at a time. You can hover around the engine and shovel coal in to keep a gauge in the green, which in turn will help keep your speed increasing, but it’s not the most exciting mechanic. There aren’t even options to view the train from different angles or enjoy the scenery as you chug through the countryside, which as a train nerd was a bit disappointing.
So far so nice, right? Things threaten to derail because the game can be quite buggy: I was aware of an issue where the game could crash, but from my experience it was happening too frequently, and in the 12+ hours I’ve played I’ve had over 30 crashes. The game autosaves when you leave a station so it’s not often a big deal, but on long journeys where you’re just waiting to arrive at your destination, a crash right as you arrive can be very frustrating. The crashes are the worst offenders, but I’ve run into quest issues too, with some not completing or seemingly locking me out of unlocking equipment. Nothing majorly game breaking, and nothing that put me off the game entirely, but it’s disappointing to have frustrations like these in a game that mostly has you feeling quite relaxed. Hopefully a patch will iron out a lot of these.
I should also mention that I’ve been playing on the Switch 2 as well. The game has a pared-back, simple visual aesthetic which I quite like and when I booted up the game I was impressed with how it was running as it’s relatively smooth. This seems to differ depending on where you are in the game though, with some of the bigger stations later in the game causing the game to chug quite significantly, so your mileage may vary if you’re playing on the original Nintendo Switch. It also wouldn’t be a cosy game without a chilled out soundtrack playing in the background. The music here fits the bill but also didn’t particularly stand out.
Locomoto is a really lovely game, and with the array of customisation options for your train plus a delightfully low stakes story. It’s a game I’ve enjoyed a lot. It may not be the smoothest ride but cosy gamers willing to get on board will enjoy a lovely, laidback journey worth taking.
