In 2024 I wrote about A Short Trip, a tiny hand-drawn game where a cat drives a train. Well now I’m back with A Bumpy Ride, a Western game where a bear (I think?) drives a train. I’m not sure why we’re seeing a boom in the animal-drives-a-train genre, but I’m into it.
A Bumpy Ride is being developed by Cosmoporium Games; its Steam demo recently got an update that includes a tutorial and unlimited in-game days of play. During those days, you pick up various animal passengers from one station and drive them to another. In addition to wanting to get to their destination on time, the animals like it when you obey train traffic signs, like going slow when a sign says to go slow or sounding your train whistle when a sign says to sound your train whistle.
The tracks you follow are set into a sprawling desert landscape that, even rendered cartoonishly, really evokes a 19th century developing West. Wooden towns appear among the tumbleweeds and cacti, from little outposts of only a few houses to relatively sprawling metropolises set among cliffs or along rivers. Some paths in the demo are blocked off by boulders that the game says requires TNT to clear, and though you can’t do this in the demo I did enjoy rolling into a TNT depot and imagining chugging around with a bunch of dynamite. The weather changes, as does the time of day, with the sky becoming an endless expanse of stars that reminded me of being alone in the wilderness in Red Dead Redemption.
While there isn’t all that much to do in the demo mechanically, what you can do is very satisfying thanks to the game’s chunky interface. You control the train with a lever on the right side of your screen, pulling it to speed up, slow down, stop, and reverse. The whistle is controlled with a pull-down tab at the top of the screen that I spent a lot of time pulling just for fun. Track directions are switched with a pop-up interface that’s equally satisfying, and also often sent me frantically checking my map to make sure I was headed the right way, especially when I was first unveiling which directions are available and wasn’t sure where a set of tracks would take me. You also have to keep your train topped up with water, stopping in just the right spot at towers placed around the map to let water pour into the right car of your train.
Satisfied passengers pay you money, and you can use this to upgrade to a new train, buy more seats for passengers, or install a bar car that makes passengers a bit more cheerful. I definitely did not satisfy all my passengers, especially when I was first learning the map and took them on long, scenic tours into the night instead of getting them to their destinations. But once I knew where I was going, A Bumpy Ride was a simple, lovely experience of chugging along following traffic laws and watching the landscape roll past, listening to the jaunty music and admiring the landscape.
Cosmoporium plans to release the game later this year, and the Steam page promises more areas, train cars, and a level-up system that will include “new upgrades, staff, and skins.”
Riley MacLeod
