Loco Motive, appropriately, is a murder mystery set on a moving train. To be precise, it’s set on the first ever steam-powered train, the Reuss Express, created by the Unterwald family. When you start the game, you’re put in the shoes of Arthur Ackerman. He’s Lady Unterwald’s estate lawyer, and she’s about to make a big announcement about the inheritor of her will.
During the announcement, though, the train is thrown into darkness as it passes into a tunnel, and Lady Unterwald is murdered in cold blood. Now the heir to her estate is up in the air. It could have been settled quickly with a look at the newest version of the will, but there’s one big problem: Arthur’s gone and let it fly out the window. Who was the heir, and who murdered Lady Unterwald? You’ll have to figure it out, working your way through a story full of twists, turns, and a lot of genuinely funny gags.
Triple The Protagonists, Triple The Fun
While you’ll spend the first few acts playing as Arthur, this comedy adventure point-and-click has three protagonists – Arthur, Herman, and Diana. Technically, most of the game is told through its three unreliable narrators, who are telling their versions of events to police who are interrogating them about the murder. Each character has a different experience of the same timeline, and as you play through each one’s recollections, you start to gain more context and understanding of each character’s motivations, how each protagonist’s actions affected the rest, and how the timelines converge.
By the end of the game, you’re playing as all three of the characters in concert. While they don’t have unique abilities or skills, they do have different inventories, and swapping items between them with environmental tools to complete their individual objectives is pretty fun.
Gameplay-wise, you can expect a pretty traditional point-and-click experience. Each character collects objects, uses those objects to solve puzzles, and gets yet more objects for their trouble to use in solving more puzzles. That said, you can choose to eliminate the pixel hunting aspects of vintage point-and-clicks entirely if you like. I preferred to play on Steam Deck (controller would also work) because when you approach selectable items, they’re marked with diamonds you can navigate between with the right stick.
Ow, My Funny Bone!
While a lot of comedy games can often feel like they’re trying too hard, Loco Motive never made me cringe with jokes that punched down or didn’t quite hit the right note. In fact, its writing is excellent. The characters are all larger than life caricatures, but they never feel unbelievable or, worse, mean. Herman, the cowardly, incompetent second protagonist, is a compelling anti-hero because he’s such an agent of chaos, and the incredibly stupid Gudrun twins’ constant bickering was a highlight. The voice acting also contributes to this – the cast really swings for the rafters here, making even minor characters sound distinct and hilarious in their own ways.
I did find Arthur’s characterisation as a bureaucracy-loving dweeb to be a bit strained, but that’s a very minor point of contention.
Amid all the comedy, the first act does a great job of setting up its three protagonists, their quirks, and their relevance to the overall story, and unfolds those mysteries at a good pace. It even manages to throw in a few jabs at how we let algorithms decide what media gets made, the incompetence of upper management so often leading to employees suffering the brunt of the consequences, and how generational wealth so often leads to unjust nepotism.
Loco Motive uses its blocky pixel art to excellent effect. While its characters and environments are rendered in less detail, the animations are wonderfully exaggerated so that every movement communicates a ton despite the fewer pixels. Every room feels alive, full of people moving and doing things, and observable objects that make the world feel more rich and complex are littered all over the place.
There’s plenty of physical comedy to be found as well – I quite enjoyed watching various protagonists shoving themselves into tiny places, stuffing huge items into their pants, and hurting themselves and others in absurd ways.
Logical Fallacies
But like many traditional point and clicks, the game often falls into the trap of puzzles not conforming to player logic. I won’t spoil specifics, but many times, brute forcing puzzles led to me asking why on earth that, of all things, would be the solution to the problem I was given. This is partly because the game has plenty of red herrings, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but other times I had to turn to the hint system for help because the solution didn’t make a ton of sense.
Speaking of the hint system: there’s almost always a telephone around that you can use to call the detective Dirk Chiselton, a famous detective and possibly the person that Herman hates most in the world. Dirk will give you increasingly explicit clues for different puzzles, which is usually enough to point you in the right direction. That said, there was a puzzle or two where the hints weren’t sufficient to help me figure out what exactly I was missing.
Right now, Loco Motive’s biggest problem is a lack of polish and a wide variety of bugs. Minor issues include sentences lacking punctuation, the camera sometimes cutting off dialogue bubbles, and being able to talk to characters who shouldn’t be talking. More annoying ones made puzzles trigger before they were meant to, leaving me confused as to why characters were yelling at me to do things I hadn’t come across yet. The worst ones were game-breaking, like in one level where a specific action moved the camera away from my character so I couldn’t interact with anything, and I had to reload the level.
These are things that can, and I expect will, be fixed in time, but the sometimes dodgy logic of Loco Motive’s puzzles is here to stay. Still, the game’s excellent acting, memorable characters, and compelling visual style make the game very worth your time, and if you’re used to the groan-inducing logic of point-and-click games of yore, Loco Motive won’t be any more frustrating than anything you’ve already played.
Reviewed on PC.
- Developer(s)
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Robust Games
- Pitch perfect comedy, with a substantial murder mystery at its core
- Colourful cast of characters with great design and excellent voice acting
- Three protagonist story structure works really well
- Puzzle logic doesn?t always feel fair
- So many bugs