Sometimes you get caught out on your big talkin’ and your bluff gets called. I said I wanted to play the Thomas the Tank Engine game. Diego asked me if I actually wanted to play it. Now, there is a lot you can say about me, but one thing is very true: I will commit to the bit, so I said, of course, I wanted to play the Thomas and Friends game. Do I know the deep Thomas lore? Friends, I do not. Mainly, I know the shitposts, memes, and mods where Thomas shows up in Skyrim, Resident Evil, or whatever. And I know the mashup with Juicy, which I am listening to as I write this.
The biggest and most interesting thing to point out is this: You think it’s going to be for children because, you know, Thomas the Tank Engine and everything, but it’s actually an introductory-level simulator. If you ever wanted to get your kids into Train Sim World or those games where you actually need to know how to run the New York subway or a German diesel-electric engine, that’s about where this lands, a gateway to the wider world of dropping $300 on train DLC for a truly authentic experience. It’s surprisingly challenging for a title based on an IP for children. It’s also possible I’m bad at being a train, but I prefer to think it’s challenging.
As I careened around Sodor, I kept getting safety violations for passing safety signals because I am a bad train. There were a lot of story missions involving hooking up sassy freight cars (the train’s natural enemy is the Foolish Freight Car). You can derail, presumably killing your literally-alive engines and cars, which raises interesting existential questions about the nature of life and death in the world of Sodor. It could be kind of hard to navigate my choo choo by peering out the window and trying to lean around, but you can adjust the camera if you’re not devoted to authenticity in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine (and Friends!).
There’s actually a lot of flavor to the world, with narrated story missions and, well, one imagines the frustrations of being a sentient engine: the freight cars are sassy, sometimes you get an objective to go to a certain point and you get dinged for being a few meters off it, you have to obey signals, and don’t you ever just want to go apeshit (in a train sense)? Sometimes it happened, as I would fail my objective and get the failure notice, usually for not stopping in time, but my train would keep rolling right along until derailing while I tried to figure out how to stop it. Maybe it was just a bug, or maybe it was a grim commentary on an engine pushed too far by the British railroading establishment.
There’s story mode, collectibles, a free roam that isn’t all that free (you might say it’s…ON RAILS! HA!) considering, you know, you’re a train, and there are trains you’ll recognize like Thomas, Percy, Gordon, Emily, and Diesel, and of course you can haul freight and passengers, but it’s not meant to be some kind of challenge where you, I don’t know, haul an ICBM being attacked by terrorists or nuclear waste or something, it’s about chilling as you choo-choo-chugga-chugga-chugga around an idealized British countryside hauling freight or passengers between destinations and rigorously obeying safety signals.
The nostalgia hit is going to be what gets you and it’s a surprisingly challenging My First Train Simulator, but the world is nice and it seems to capture exactly what I’d expect, even if the life of a train is a lot of hooking up cargo cars, dealing with safety signals, figuring out your route, and watching your passengers clip through the floor. You’re not going to care about things like the occasional bug and a sometimes janky UI when you’re riding the steel rails through Sodor, mellowing out and watching the world go by, and aw, son of a bitch, I missed the spot and failed the mission.
Good
The Final Word
A surprisingly engaging My First Train Simulator.
