It’s not often that video games set out to mimic small things. Photorealism tends to depict the world at a scale that humans can walk around in. But, swivelling a macro-lens onto that Unreal Engine camera and pointing it at digital miniatures produces a wonderful effect that makes RAILGRADE’s otherwise fairly standard route plan puzzling an absolute joy to get stuck into. In short, it’s transportive. For me, it throws me right back to my childhood bedroom, where a constantly reconfigured TOMY train set enjoyed permanent residence on the floor, forever delivering assorted handfuls of lego bricks between the Ghostbusters fire station and a permanently downed Star Trek: The Next Generation shuttlecraft. Who knows why. The mind of a ten year-old is unknowable, even if you were one. It would be a disservice to RAILGRADE to make out, though, that its only merit is as some sort of jumpers-for-goalposts prompt for childhood nostalgia. It’s a solid, stage-based transport puzzler which is forgiving enough to remain a fun time throughout, but challenging enough to cause much scratching of head, particularly in the bonus stages. The open-ended nature of it promotes a wealth of replayability, and the whole thing is shot through with a great sense of humour: there is, would you believe, an overarching story about overthrowing space-capitalists, with plenty of wry observations about worker exploitation thrown in. A product of the times, then. RAILGRADE is available now on Nintendo Switch and on PC via the Epic games store.
