Wealthy tycoon Lady Unterwald is preparing to give a speech aboard the ultra-luxurious Reuss Express, revealing her updated will and testament. But just before she can make her announcement, Lady Unterwald is killed! Now, three guests aboard the train – lawyer Arthur Ackerman, novelist Herman Merman, and undercover spy Diana Osterhagen – must investigate and solve the murder before they are accused of killing her themselves. But with the train packed with bizarre characters ranging from single-minded twins to a sleazy gambler to an entire secret order, solving this mystery will be no easy task.
Developed by Robust Games and published by Chucklefish, Loco Motive is a fast-paced point-and-click mystery game with a rapier wit, a twisty central mystery, and a fun pixel art style that hearkens back to classic adventure games. Players alternate between controlling Arthur, Herman, and Diana as they interrogate witnesses, search for evidence, and ultimately find and confront Lady Unterwald’s murderer.
Loco Motive is a fun romp that will delight mystery fans and adventure game lovers alike. The humor is strong, with plenty of hilarious dialogue – I particularly loved it any times the twins, Gunter and Hagen, would get into an argument with one another, or any time Herman would bring up one of his bizarrely titled mystery novels. The mystery itself is satisfying and well-written – not impossible to solve but not too easy either. It helps that, for a good chunk of the game, you are actually solving two intertwined mysteries – who killed Lady Unterwald, and who did she name as her heir in the updated will?
Because it is a roughly 15 hour game centered around a single central mystery, there were a few moments that felt a bit like “padding” – particularly instances when you had to travel back and forth between locations multiple times (the train is several cars long, and often your destination would be all the way at one end or another). However, this was overall a minor complaint, and I enjoyed the game thoroughly.
One thing that impressed me about Loco Motive is that, in some places, you are experiencing the same events two or three times from the perspectives of different characters. However, despite this, the game doesn’t feel bloated or repetitive (except for the couple of times where you had to repeatedly run from one end of the train to the other) and each character truly felt like their contributions to the story were valid and unique. Later in the game, you are given the ability to swap between characters, each having their own inventory, which was quite a fun twist on the core gameplay!
I will admit to preferring Herman the most of the three, simply because his “mystery novelist who has bought into his own hype and thinks he’s a legitimate detective” gimmick is hilarious, especially to fans of the genre. He reminded me of a reverse Jessica Fletcher (of Murder, She Wrote fame) or Richard Castle (of Castle) who THOUGHT that he was this brilliant mystery-solving genius but was in truth a bit of an incompetent bumbler. Honestly, I would play an entire game just starring the indomitable Herman Merman!
Gameplay-wise, it was clear that Loco Motive was inspired by the classic Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games, such as the Sam & Max and Monkey Island series, and it did a really good job of paying homage to them. Unfortunately, it took both the good and the bad from this classic formula – the “good” being the witty dialogue, memorable characters, and colorful pixel art style and the “bad” being the occasional bizarre and logic-defying puzzle.
Is it really a point-and-click game if there isn’t at least one “that one puzzle” that you find yourself completely stuck on, bashing your head against a metaphorical wall as you realize that the logical solution you were SO SURE was correct is in fact not even close to what the game wants you to do? Loco Motive doesn’t have you rearranging soup cans to spell a cohesive sentence with “Y” as your only available vowel, thank goodness, (oh, The 7th Guest, how I both hate and love you) but it has a few moments where you can easily get stuck and find yourself unsure of what to do. Fortunately, the game does have a robust hint system in the form of a telephone that you can call for advice. (I liked making Herman make the calls, because the detective on the other end of the line, Dirk Chiselton, is his imagined “rival” who he absolutely cannot stand). You can call back multiple times to get increasingly more detailed hints, so it is unlikely that you will end up stuck on the same puzzle forever even if you aren’t quite grasping the logic. And you don’t even have to spend Professor Layton-style Hint Coins to do it!
Loco Motive’s pixel art style is colorful and eye-catching, and really gives the game its own identity and flair. I particularly liked how each of the train’s cars is designed differently enough that they stand out from one another, from the refined elegance of the dining car to the glitz of the casino to the sterile black-and-white color scheme of the kitchen. It really made the game’s setting work – a train can be a fairly boring place, but Loco Motive’s Reuss Express is nothing of the sort!
Players nostalgic for the classic pixel art romps of decades past, players looking for a fun mystery, and players just hoping to have a good time with some out-there characters should all give Loco Motive a try. After all, Lady Unterwald’s killer can’t be allowed to get away scot free – and Arthur, Herman, and Diana need your help to find the right answer and bring the criminal to justice!
Kate played Loco Motive on PC with a review code.
