Please do not watch! The following footage has left Géraldine and the GlobalESportNews editorial team deeply disturbed. So it’s all the more great that there is finally news on this awful game.
Siderodromophobia. This is what experts call the panic fear of trains. You are not affected? Don’t worry, I can change that. Do you belong instead to the illustrious circle of arachnophobes, the sixth most common phobia in humans? Not either? Well, let’s combine the two and create a whole new fear. I call it Charliophobia – the fear of Charles.
When the trailer for the survival horror game Choo-Choo-Charles came into our hands last year, the GlobalESportNews editorial team had only one common wish: “I wish I’d never seen this.”
In Choo-Choo-Charles, I am haunted by a train on spider legs and with a face I conjure up on a half-awake night when I have the flu again. Haunted, as in present tense, because ever since I saw the trailer back then, Charles hasn’t let me go.
What the hell is that?
Obviously the character Charles here was inspired by Stephen King’s Charlie the Choo-Choo from The Dark Tower universe. Well, or of course from the various “Thomas the Little Engine” mods for Resident Evil and co. Perhaps a dangerous mixture of both.
Even if it’s hard to believe, there’s also a real game behind this madness – so you know. With gameplay and so on. And it’s exactly this gameplay that, after the first trailer, we finally got to see at the Day of the Devs at Summer Game Fest. If you really want to watch it, please do. I’m not your mum. But the peace of never having seen Charles in action never returns.
From this gameplay video we can now also guess whether Choo-Choo-Charles can be more than a curious phenomenon. Because there are also real survival mechanics in it.
I travel from A to B on a train (without spider legs, of course), can upgrade this train and shoot at the crawling Charles in an action-packed panic. But I can also leave the train (even if this need is limited) and talk to, say, the inhabitants of the mysterious village where Charles is up to his mischief. How his appearance is explained in the story … I’m really curious about that.
The ultimate goal: to upgrade my train to an indestructible fighting machine and challenge Charles to a final battle to the death.
Clearly, Choo-Choo Charles is not an upper league horror game like, say, Callisto Protocol, also shown at Summer Game Fest. But it takes me back to the nostalgic times of Slenderman and co. – and even brings along quite atmospheric survival mechanics. Leaving the train and descending into dark mines to search for important upgrade parts is something I imagine to be quite exciting. For a round with colleagues and pizza, Choo-Choo Charles should definitely be just the thing.
The studio behind Choo-Choo Charles is Two Star Games. They previously released the horror games My Friend is Raven, Night in Riverager and My Beautiful Paper Smile and the post-apocalyptic adventure Cloud Climber on Steam. All enjoy very positive reviews and all are free to play. Choo-Choo Charles, in turn, is due to crawl onto PC and consoles later in 2022. Oh well. Take your time, Charles. Take your time.
