Spooky Express – Review

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Introduction

I’m sure that with the cavalcade of amazing horror games we have seen over the last ten or so months, most people will not struggle to find the one that gives them the right balance of tricks and treats for the spooky season. I also would imagine that a game about building train tracks and transporting passengers to their designated locations is not typical gameplay people would think of when asked what a good Halloween game is. While Spooky Express may lack the bone-chilling horror some are looking for this time of year, it more than makes up for it with its charming art style, cleverly-layered puzzle mechanics, and enough content to fill a bubbling cauldron!

Premise

Spooky Express is the latest game from puzzle aficionado game developer and publisher Draknek & Friends, and a loose successor to their 2017 release, Cosmic Express. You are the conductor of the titular Spooky Express, a small skeletal train that runs through the darkest depths of Trainsylvania. Your job is to plot your route across grid-like levels, picking up and dropping off a variety of passengers who all have their particular demands. With over 200 levels spread across multiple devilishly diverse biomes, there is a lot of puzzling to give your braaaaainsss a workout!

Spooky Express is all about the puzzles, eschewing any sort of narrative. You get brief still image cutscenes of cute comic strips at the beginning of each new area, but these are just funny moments, little jokes to break up the puzzles. While it is wonderful to play a game like Spooky Express, which is so direct in its gameplay and offers so much, it would be nice to see some more worldbuilding or even a different approach to progression. I played another title by Draknek & Friends earlier this year, The Electrifying Incident, and while that was a different type of puzzle game and shorter than Spooky Express, I got a real kick out of how it played out as one complete scenario as opposed to separate levels linked on a map.

Gameplay

The standard rules for each puzzle are that your train can only enter a square once, so no crossing the tracks, and that you must deliver all passengers to their respective destinations by the end of the puzzle, which you do by linking your track with the one exiting the puzzle. As you progress through the game, reaching new regions of Triansylvania, you’ll meet new passenger types. At first, you’ll be dealing with zombies who need to be dropped off at gravesites and vampires who wish to return to their coffins, with others such as acolytes, demons, and humans being added. But not all of these groups get along, as I’m sure you could imagine, which is where a lot of Spooky Express’s most interesting and devious puzzling occurs.

You see, there is a pecking order in Spooky Express of who is the scariest, and this affects how each passenger interacts with the other types. Humans are scared of everything, of course, and will run away to the other end of the platform or jump out of the train to get away from any of the monsters. Alongside this is the added factor that there are some important interactions that occur between passengers under the right circumstances. Have both a zombie and a human try to jump into your train cart and bump into each other? The human is turned into a zombie. Have a human jump off your train next to a vampire? You’re up one vampire, but down a human. However, what appears to be an obstacle to be avoided can quickly become the solution to your current puzzle.

A quick scan of a new level tells the player immediately what is required, regardless of what passengers are involved. For example, you might start a puzzle with a human on board, with a vampire waiting to be picked up, and two coffins. The solution requires you to have the vampire turn the human passenger to occupy both coffins before moving on to the next level. The coffins were the key, and by quickly assessing this, players can narrow down potential solutions and avoid frustration. It’s not a quick fix, as the main puzzle is still working out how to lay down your track and fulfill your goals, but it gives players a little bit of direction, naturally delivered via the puzzle’s design.

It’s that approachability that I appreciate most with Spooky Express. It does an excellent job of continuing to lay the track down to keep moving forward without leaving the player in the dust among the gravestones. Viewing each grid-based level from an isometric view keeps the whole puzzle on screen, and easy to inspect and navigate. Players can manually undo the track they have laid down, or choose to reverse the last action as many times as they want, or reset the puzzle with the press of a button. But it is the game’s spectral hint system that impressed me most. Pressing a button will have a small portion of the correct track layout appear as a ghostly green apparition to give you some guidance from beyond the grave!

The structure of Spooky Express is a great example of how to create a staggered, but ever-increasing sense of challenge and complexity. The first few levels of each new region teach the player about new passengers before incorporating them into later puzzles with previous elements. It allows players to learn new rules and add them to their knowledge bank, ready to apply to future puzzles more naturally. Each slope upwards in difficulty is followed by a plateau to let you adjust to the new level of difficulty; a moment to catch your breath, all while still learning new rules to master. Thankfully, for those of us looking for more of a challenge, extra levels become available in each area once you complete all that area’s main levels. Spooky Express is for both puzzle novices and pros, offering a spooky smorgasbord of content for puzzle fans to dig their fangs and claws into.

Visuals

The art direction of Spooky Express gives me flashbacks to my kids playing with wooden train tracks and Fisher Price toys; definitely leaning into the Candy Corn vibes of the season! The character models of all the passengers are charming, like children wearing their Halloween costumes, and the short, expressive animations they have, whether shaking with fright, jumping on board your train, or being turned to ash, bring so much life to this land of the living dead. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the game’s art style is thanks to David Hellman and Zac Gorman, of Braid and Costume Quest fame, respectively.

Each region of Trainsylvania, from the Pumpkin Patch to the Impish Inferno, is unique, from its colour scheme to the props dotted around each puzzle. Despite the spooky nature of the game, each area is bursting with colours that match Spooky Express’s lighthearted world and tone.

Sound

The soundscape of Spooky Express, the music and sound effects, captures the game’s family-friendly aesthetic, gently crooning in the background as you lose yourself in each puzzle, the obligatory theremin present and correct. The highlight of the game’s sound design is the short, delicate songs of Priscilla Snow, which play during the comic strip cutscenes between each biome. They have a melancholic nature not found in the rest of the game, and despite this, they work brilliantly.

Conclusion

Spooky Express isn’t just a puzzle game that has a lick of Halloween paint thrown over it; it intertwines the game’s mechanics and theming to create a fun, approachable, and cleverly designed series of puzzles that will have fans shrieking with delight.

Offering a new experience as polished and smooth as the game’s train tracks, Draknek & Friends continue to prove they are monstrously good puzzle makers. With Spooky Express, they’ve mastered the traditional track; now I’d love to see where their next train of thought takes the genre.