Dreadline Express Review
Uncover fellow passengers’ secrets in Dreadline Express, a bleak narrative horror game set aboard a train carrying humanity’s last survivors through a Lovecraftian apocalypse.
Dreadline Express. Credit: David Konecny / Shoreline Games
David Konecny’s Dreadline Express is a post-apocalyptic narrative horror game, a Lovecraftian spin on Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer. Instead of a climate crisis and an endless expanse of ice, occult horrors have awoken, terraforming Earth into a hellscape that’s killing everything. You wake up with no memory on the last human train, travelling to a destination it seems unable to reach. You’re locked in your cabin because the train’s oppressive operators have chosen you to be sacrificed to keep it going.
Except the train rejects you. The strange conductor informs you that the engineer running the train has decided this is a sign: you should be the one to choose the next passenger to sacrifice. Who should you sacrifice? Why does the train even need them in the first place? What happened, and where are you going?
You communicate with the other passengers using your collection of tarot-like cards representing people, things, events, or even abstract concepts like “loss.” The system is a more complex version of the card conversation mechanic in Bastinus Rex and Critical Reflex’s Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs, a horror fantasy adventure released last year. I love how Dreadline Express expands on it and creates a deeper narrative with greater nuance in your questions based on how you combine cards. Combine up to three cards in your hand to form a question or statement. For example, combining your own card with the “daughter” card might prompt you to talk about your family, while using another passenger’s card with “daughter” will ask them about theirs. Some combinations result in surprising questions and even more illuminating answers. When you make a discovery, you might earn a new card for your collection, giving you completely new avenues to investigate. The developer calls it a “metroidbrania,” an apt description reflecting how knowledge becomes a literal item you use to unlock new narrative paths.
Dreadline Express. Credit: David Konecny / Shoreline Games
Dreadline Express. Credit: David Konecny / Shoreline Games
The characters themselves are fascinating; each is a flawed individual with his or her own motivations and secrets to uncover, and finding the right questions can be tricky. You can build up their trust or, in some cases, make a choice that irrevocably alienates them from you. And it won’t necessarily be because you decided to sacrifice them. Most conversations won’t result in anything permanent, but some choices will have consequences. There are clearly multiple endings, and I definitely didn’t get the best one. It might be difficult to implement because of the somewhat non-linear narrative, but I wish the game had a mechanism for recording your choices and letting you rewind to explore other paths, like the branching story trees in the Zero Escape games. I want to see other outcomes, but I don’t have the patience to replay the entire game, remembering and retrying combinations of cards and questions to reach something new.
The small train car you explore is hauntingly beautiful. Low-poly models take on a different dimension thanks to the gloomy lighting and a painterly posterization effect that limits color gradation. The limited viewing distance makes shapes emerge out of an otherworldly haze as you move forward. Outside, red skies, barren trees, and occasional glimpses of terrifying creatures create a perfect balance of mystery and terror, making the train feel even more oppressive. I sometimes wished I could walk a little faster, but it would have hurt the mood to zip back and forth through the train. It makes your movement feel more deliberate.
Dreadline Express is a wonderful, spooky experience that you can finish in a few hours, though you may not see everything there is to discover. I wish exploring its other paths were easier. The writing is amazing, but I need a quicker way to get through what I’ve already seen.
Dreadline Express
Dreadline Express is hauntingly beautiful and wonderfully bleak, with excellent writing and a card conversation system that makes figuring out what to ask as compelling as discovering the answers.
Uncover fellow passengers’ secrets in Dreadline Express, a bleak narrative horror game set aboard a train carrying humanity’s last survivors through a Lovecraftian apocalypse.