Night Train Preview

Night Train

Xportmedia’s Night Train is an upcoming experimental point-and-click adventure game that takes place inside a woman’s dream. There are no items to collect and no inventory to use, and that’s just the beginning of the game’s uniqueness. Xportmedia recently released a demo for the game, and we dove in to give you our first impressions.

Before we tell you what we saw, here’s the official game introduction from the developer:

Anna is alone. Travelling late at night, she drifts off to a restless sleep. She dreams about the events in her life that brought her to this journey on the Night Train. As you explore her memories you begin to find new ones surface as you glimpse at the events that shaped her life. Throughout the dream you will learn the fate of her family and her ultimate destiny.

Night Train is a first-person adventure, meaning you see the environment through Anna’s eyes. Anna’s dream begins in her father’s study, where you can access Anna’s various memories by examining the items inside: paintings on the wall, books, and other mementos.

At first the demo was quite disorienting, since everything we seemed to click on resulted in Anna muttering “that’s not right” to herself. But once we wrapped our head around what we were supposed to do, the game took on newfound depth.

It started with a single clue on a piece of paper, which offered a hint about what to click on next. The clue might be something like: First steps will skill so neat; She’ll need these to protect her feet. This refers to the picture of ballet slippers on the wall. Clicking on the picture yields another clue indicated another object that needs to be found, and so on.

Although navigating around the study proved to be a bit disorienting and frustrating (let’s hope it’s finessed before the game’s final launch), Night Train‘s unique premise and story was enough to pique our interest.

Night Train will be the first in an anthology called The Things That Haunt Us, which according to Xportmedia is designed to be “an experiment in digital story telling that will use games to explore a collection of tales. These can be adventure, interactive fiction and possibly a platform game thrown in for fun!”

The game should see final release sometime this month. For more info and to check out the demo yourself, visit Xportmedia’s website.

Erin Bell