This is a hard game to not recommend. But at the end of the day, I think I would have rather spent the money on some other game, and I can't really recommend it, feeling like that.

I do want to start with the things they did well, though, because there is SO MUCH WORK put into this game, and it's heartbreaking that the rest of it lets it down.

Any discussion of this game needs to talk about the art, and especially the animation, both of which are extremely well done. There's a fairly recognizable set of common actions in the point-and-click genre that nobody bothers trying to animate, because it's just not worth it - the action is way too complicated to spend a ton of time animating, or the action only ever happens once, so you can't justify the work by re-using the animation somewhere.

Loco Motive gives the distinct impression that it's hell-bent on avoiding "cheating" on as many of these as it can possibly get away with. A character changes clothes? In most point-and-clicks, you'd either have them move off camera for a second, or you'd just get a brief fade-to-black and some swooshing-fabric noises, and boom, done - and that's perfectly fine! Not here, though - when Arthur puts on a suit jacket, there's a smooth, well-done, two-second-or-so bit of custom animation, that gets used only this once, just because the animators didn't want to punt.

The coup de grace, though, is that there are specific, customized animations for combining inventory items. I've played a pretty fair number of point-and-clicks, and I have NEVER seen ANYONE do this. In just about any other game, the well-established norm is just to have a voice line of "Okay, I [tied] the [fork] to the [stick]!" and snap cut to the new item in your inventory - or, if you're really trying for extra credit, a stock animation of the character fumbling with something in their hands.

Having one-off animations for almost all of the separate inventory-item combinations you create throughout the game is insane, and when I saw these in-game, it legitimately blew me away because you've gotta understand that NOBODY DOES THIS: animation is hard, and therefore time-consuming, and therefore expensive. But they did it anyway, because they cared, and they didn't want to cheat.

This level of visual polish that Loco Motive gets by upping the art and animation budget blows past nearly any other point-and-click adventure on Steam. But the cost of that visual polish is that - I'm guessing - it took that budget away from the writing and the puzzle design, and the resultant issues in those areas are, in my opinion, enough of a problem to ultimately sink the game.

I think my issues with the writing generally boil down to the notion that the game is just... too silly for its own good. In a sense, it's not really fair to criticize the game for this, because it's clearly intended to be a comedy game first and foremost, and it's not trying to be serious or dramatic. But the game's story is still, at its core, a murder mystery, and if you're going to make a murder mystery game, then you're accepting a set of expectations that you need to fulfill in order for players to feel like your story is rewarding to "read".

Loco Motive feels like too much of a circus to ever really address these expectations, and the end result is that the story itself (in an ostensibly narrative-driven game!) feels somehow like an afterthought - something that trundles along awkwardly, reshaping itself as needed in order to provide the requisite environmental setup for whatever joke comes next.

And to be clear, these are good jokes in a funny circus! For all the issues I have with the "serious" writing, I was pretty happy with the comic writing, and I thought the voice actors did a great job in getting them to land. But the problem is, I feel like there needs to be a solid framework for the jokes to provide comic relief from, and I feel like Loco Motive's core plot is too roundabout and fragmented to do that.

From the game's opening cutscene, you're set up to feel like you're going to be investigating the crime, putting together the pieces, and figuring out which of the people on board might be the culprit. This... never really happens. Instead, you're running around on random errands that often have little-to-nothing to do with the mystery, just to clear out one logjam after the next, while the plot moves on - usually without you.

I mean, yeah, it's a point-and-click adventure, there's a certain acceptable degree of "wacky BS gets in your way", but so much of what you're doing is bizarre side-errands, and so little of what you're doing has to do with the actual goals you're given, that I... can't really even remember what most of the "real" goals even were - when I think back on playing this game, I remember objectives like "I need to get into the kitchen" or "I need to talk to the drunk guy", and certainly not "I need to figure out who killed Lady Unterwald".

Moreso than that, there's not really any way for the player to try to work out whodunit on their own, which I feel like is a major part of a murder-mystery game. When the killer is finally revealed, it's not... contrived or anything, like, it's not like it's nonsense, but there were never any clues or leads as to why them. They could have picked just about anybody to get revealed as the killer, and you'd still say "...sure, I guess they did it. Why not."

As for the puzzles, I generally felt like they fell into two camps: ones that felt pretty obvious, and ones that felt completely impossible. I can tolerate some head-scratchers in a point-and-click, but because so few puzzles seemed to fall into the sweet spot - all of them felt either too easy or too hard - none of them felt particularly satisfying to solve; either you tried every combination of inventory items and world items you could think of (and/or gave up and checked a walkthrough), or you understood exactly what you had to do, but had to go wander the train in search of what you needed.

Also, in my opinion, there's too many "distraction" puzzles - the ones where you need to create a distraction to lure an NPC away from something so that you can mess with it. There's not anything inherently wrong with distraction puzzles, but I feel like Loco Motive overuses them: if used sparingly, you feel clever for figuring out what you need to do, but when there's this many of them, you get conditioned to start expecting them, and it stops feeling fun or clever. It also doesn't help that I don't remember ever being expected to use an inventory item in these puzzles - all you need to do while the NPC is distracted is just "use the thing" or "take the thing" - which cheapens these puzzles further.

At the end of the day, between the zaniness of the setting, the zaniness of the story, and the zaniness of the puzzles, I ended up feeling like the story could basically take any turn it wanted, whenever it wanted, and it'd make as much sense as anything else - and as a result, I pretty much stopped caring about it. I more or less unplugged from the story; I played out the rest of the game primarily just to avoid leaving it unfinished.

I wish this game held together better, because there's so much hard work put into it and so many good things it's got going for it - but unfortunately, it feels like the game's good parts (art, animation, voice acting, comedy writing) are all "nice to haves", and its bad parts (plot writing, puzzles) are all "need to haves" - and that combination unfortunately just doesn't hold up.

Loco Motive is what happens when Monkey Island, steals a train, and hired a ridiculously talented voice cast.
The humor is sharp and the art is lovingly crafted.
The teamwork section is chaotic genius — messy, clever, and perfectly controlled.
I laughed, I clicked everything, and had great time — would derail again.
Thanks for this adventuregem @Robust Games

Not a huge fan of the puzzles, but the story was pretty fun and the characters very charming.