Train Sim World (PS4/Xbox One/PC, 2018)
It’s weird how much the Train Simulator games have played a part in my life. Railworks 2 got me interested in train games, and its transition over to yearly editions of Train Simulator gave me plenty to cover during my first ever trips to Gamescom - trips which eventually landed me a role as Editor of Pocket Gamer.
It’s been a wild ride these past nine years or so (probably coming up to ten, Jesus Christ), but digital trains are still a love of mine. I simply don’t have the time to write about them anymore, as I’m too busy writing about anything I can get my hands on for sweet, sweet money. And sometimes, that means forgetting to write a blog post for Trains in Games until like, 6 months after the PR guy gave me a code for it. Sorry, Ben (who has now apparently left that job, so... this is all kind of pointless).
Train Sim World, then. A slightly more stripped-back version of the true Train Simulator experience, it’s the first outing of the series on console, but hasn’t taken many concessions to accomodate the move. That’s a good thing - the controls are all intact, and while there’s button combinations on your controller to press, you can just as easily use first-person view to hit everything in the cockpit instead.
But I’m more interested in the “World” part, because now you can get up and physically walk around the environments, both on the train and off the train. Hence why I spent so long messing around in Reading, a station I had become intimately attuned to following a brief time living in Oxford.
Train Sim World’s Reading isn’t like the real Reading. For one, the WHSmiths is gone. And for another, it’s never that quiet in the station. You can walk around digital Reading station and bump into maybe three people. Perhaps it’s because I had the clock set to 10pm, when the only folks around are people making connections to Oxford when trying to get home from London - again, something I knew all too well.
It’s eerily quiet, almost to the point of being beautifully serene. You have this entire blank landscape with absolutely no interaction, just you and the walls and the doors. There’s a haunting kind of beauty to the whole thing, like you’ve just wandered into somewhere long abandoned, a place the locals tell you through hushed tones and terrified eyes that it is definitely haunted. No train times ever show up - trains simply arrive like ghosts through the fog, begging you to get on them and drive them to the next stop. You oblige. It is pleased. You leave, and the train leaves too, no driver on board. But you feel like it knows where it’s going.
I wrote this post a) because I’ve felt guilty about not writing it for months now and b) because I was hoping Ben would hook me up with the Trans-Pennine DLC and I could wax lyrical about the North of England while driving a train about. But he’s gone now, so that’s that plan scuppered. If anyone from Lick PR is reading this, find me on Twitter yeah?