Cosmic Express: adorable train puzzler coming March
Mind the gap, little alien friends!
Oh yay! There's a new game coming soon from the A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build folk and Tyu - an artist from the Klondike collective. It looks like they're going all in on the adorable puzzler genre with Cosmic Express [official site]; a really lovely train route planning game set in the bubble of a space colony.
I've been tinkering with the preview build and it starts off gently but soon ramps up! The idea is that you have a little train which can accommodate a certain number of passengers. The aliens are different colours and you're trying to transport them to the platform of the matching colour so they can built a little house. Your only mode of interaction is to lay train tracks across the square grid. If an empty passenger car passes adjacent to an alien the alien hops in, if it passes next to the correct colour of platform it hops out. The complications set in because you'll generally be transporting multiple aliens to multiple platforms so you need to plan the route carefully otherwise you might try to pick up a passenger using a full train.
As the levels progress you'll encounter other spanners in the works. I've just found a cute little green alien who coats the train cars it hops into in green goop so the other kinds of aliens refuse to get in. That's changed a straightforward level into a more considered experience as I work around my messy passenger!
As per the info I have to hand:
"Only hours after the launch of A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, Alan Hazelden sat down on the California Zephyr train in Chicago. As part of Train Jam 2015, he made the short game Train Braining, which would later form the base for Cosmic Express. Over a year later, he teamed up again with Benjamin Davis (A Good Snowman) along with the talented 3D artist, Tyu, to form the Cosmic Engineers."
I also just want to put this out there as a merch suggestion: I would totally buy a snowglobe of this game.
Cosmic Express has a release date of 16 March. Toot toot!