Railbound — Adorable trains on bumpy tracks

Corey Hardt, 28 November 2022

Railbound is a charming track-laying puzzle game about traveling by train with your two canine companions. The “charming” element can't be overstated: your tiny locomotives bounce along through cute 3D landscapes as pleasant, calming music accompanies your thoughtful placement of each new length of track. Railbound continues the trend of developer Afterburn's previous games, the similarly cute and puzzly Inbento and Golf Peaks. If only all puzzle games could be this warm and cozy! Aesthetic wholesomeness, however, is not the sum total of a game, and when it comes to the strength of Railbound's puzzles, things get a little more complicated.

The world of Railbound is neatly divided into various moods, all of them quite lovely. You'll guide your little train cars through autumnal forests, tropical islands and snow-covered hills, each with their own catchy tune and wonderful illustrated scenes to cap them off. The main event is a path of levels that runs through each world. You're dropped into a scene of disconnected tracks, cars and whatever fun new feature is the focus in this area, such as tunnels that connect underground or buttons that flip nearby junctions or boom gates. Your task is to use your cursor to place lengths of track, up to a different limit in each level, to connect all of these pieces together and get everything where it needs to go while avoiding collisions.

Following that central through-line of puzzles is a pleasant and pretty gentle experience: even several worlds into Railbound, I found that the first handful of levels in each were simple to complete. This is where the bonus levels come into play: they appear as “branches” off the main route through the game. Completing puzzle 2-7 might unlock access to 2-7A, which in turn could lead to a B... and the challenge level tends to ramp up proportionately. This structure makes for a great player experience: if I'm enjoying the mechanics in this particular world, like I found myself enjoying the tunnels of World 2, I can stick around and attempt harder and harder versions of similar levels. If instead one area doesn't really click with me, I'm free to quickly blaze through the primary puzzles and move on to the next world.

Let me walk you through a sequence of events that was quite a frequent occurrence for me during my time with Railbound: I start a new level, and spend a minute getting the lay of the land. I realize that it's a relatively small one, and that the number of tracks available for me to place is similarly small. I notice quickly that a few track placements are unavoidable: there's a one-space gap between this train car and the existing track ahead of it. After filling in a few such gaps, I have only a handful of rails left to place, and I realize that to link up each separate area of existing track, there's really only one or two arrangements possible. With all the track placements quickly settled, all that's left is to switch a few turns back and forth to find the right orientation. I run the level once just to see if I've stumbled upon the solution right off the bat (sometimes I have) and if it doesn't work, I'll switch one or two junctions and try again. With these compact levels, more often than not this method led to speedy success.

So I've told you how I solved some of the puzzles. What's the issue here? Well, you'll notice that nowhere in that walkthrough did I mention spending much time thinking about the routes that the train cars were going to take, which tracks they'd be on at any given time, when they'd be hitting switches, etc. It's very clear to me that thinking about these things is the “fun” logical puzzle-solving experience that Railbound wants to give to a player. What we're really getting to here is a discussion about an “optimal strategy” and its ability to detract from the game experience. There's nothing strictly “wrong” with the way I described completing those simpler, more compact levels. I’m just a player using the information I have to find the answer in the most efficient way I know how. The “problem” comes in when we start thinking about what we really want out of playing a puzzle game.

Following a path of logical realizations, having those “eureka” moments where you understand something about a system that you didn't previously, those are the reasons I really enjoy thinky games, and I don't think I'm alone in that. A puzzle designer guides us, nudging us gently towards noticing something interesting while allowing us the pleasure of figuring it out on our own. The time-based elements of Railbound's moving cars are quite tricky to hold in your mind, especially when there are several of them moving in different directions. When the fastest and easiest way to solve a puzzle is through trial-and-error, placing some rails where they obviously need to go and fiddling with a few junctions, that's naturally how most players will end up solving them. It robs us of the joy of following the train-of-thought the designer planned out – the intentional “solve-path” through the puzzle.

I truly don't think this would be an issue worth mentioning if there were only a handful of levels like this in Railbound – surely all puzzle games have some “easier” levels that can be figured out this way. Unfortunately that's not the case here: I encountered this sequence of events many times on my journey through the game, usually multiple times in each world. I'd run into a small level and unavoidably start noticing once again that my 6 track pieces can really only work in one configuration... and before I knew it, I had finished the level and was left feeling like I'd somehow “cheated” again. Maybe the answer to this kind of issue lies in more playtesting – watching how people go about solving these levels. Maybe it lies somewhere deeper in the design of the system itself, thinking hard about what the solve-path looks like using this combination of mechanics. I can only speculate, but I think it's an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise very polished game.

Ultimately, Railbound is quite a pleasant and cozy puzzle game. If you want to relax, play with some trains, solve a few puzzles and enjoy some very pretty environmental artwork and music, I think you could do a lot worse than picking this game up. I don't think I'd call it a mind-blowing masterwork in terms of novel puzzle-solving experiences, but also, I don't think that's always a requirement to have a good time with a game. Sometimes a level left me feeling unsatisfied, and sometimes they felt just right. Maybe Railbound falls a bit short of my hopes or the potential that I saw in it, but all that being said, I certainly don't regret the time I've spent conducting these charming little locomotives.