Spooky Express

Spooky Express is a line-drawing puzzle game about transporting cute monsters on a train. You must lay a train track that takes every monster to its destination, but the level space is limited and passengers may react in various ways. This is a spiritual successor to Cosmic Express from puzzle game studio Draknek & Friends, but it doesn’t require any knowledge of the previous game.

This is a 3D game played on an isometric grid. You must build a railway to take various cute monsters and other passengers to their destinations. Vampires go in coffins, zombies go in graves, and so on. Some levels also include a human passenger who must be on the train when it exits. For most of the game, the train can only hold one passenger at a time, so you must carefully plan your route to get everyone on and off in the right order.

The game features over 200 levels broken up into nine worlds, each of which introduces a new mechanic. Each world generally has a short pathway of required levels that you must do in order to unlock the next world, and also several branching side paths featuring optional harder levels. The main path often has two branches, either of which you can complete to unlock the next world. Trains with multiple carts are introduced late in the game, in optional levels.

Spooky Express builds on Cosmic Express with substantial changes to the puzzle mechanics: while the latter commonly relied on twisted topology and portals, the former puts much more focus on passenger interactions. Spooky Express also features a few comic-strip cutscenes and partial hinting, which reveals a small segment of a solution in each level. Despite its monster theme, all the characters and art are cute and whimsical, making this a family-friendly puzzle game suitable for all ages.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.