It’s a story you’ve probably heard before: there’s a detective, a rich, old heiress with an amended will, and an assembled group of people all hoping to benefit from it. And then, as these stories usually do, it ends in murder. On a train! But don’t be fooled by the plentiful Agatha Christie-isms: this work of whodunnitry is wholly unique while paying tribute to its influences, and may even be one of our favourite modern point-and-clicks.
In the astoundingly well-named Loco Motive, you play as three separate characters – Arthur, a paperwork-loving estate attorney; Herman Merman, a crime novel-author-turned-detective; and Diana, a spy and bounty hunter working for the Inland Revenue Service, which we really hope isn’t a real thing. These three are your guides as you try to piece together the mysterious and sudden murder of a rich matriarch on a train through a series of goofy, absurd item combinations, interspersed with plot twists, reveals, and comedic cutscenes.
In case you can’t already tell, Loco Motive absolutely knows where its inspirations lie: the twistiness of Christie, the delightful unseriousness of Monkey Island et al., and the stunningly lifelike art of Ghost Trick are all worn proudly on its sleeve. But instead of just haphazardly glueing these disparate elements together like… well, like the solution to an extremely abstract point-and-click puzzle, Loco Motive manages to create something entirely its own, positioning itself alongside all of its forebears without looking like some unqualified upstart.
Much like Ghost Trick, the pixel animations are genuinely jaw-dropping with the amount of detail, fluidity, and thought that has gone into each one – every single item combination has its own animation, for goodness’ sake – and the distinct characterisation of each person that you meet and play as is achieved with simple, but cleverly applied, movements. A bartender wiggles an eyebrow to display confidence in his skills; two squabbling twins fight dynamically over a briefcase until it breaks; and did we mention that the entire game is lip-synced? We’re not sure if we’ve ever seen lip sync applied to a pixel-based game, and up until Loco Motive, we wouldn’t have believed it could be done so well. It’s a real shame that we can’t show off the animations in these screenshots, because they’re truly something special to witness.
The writing more than holds its own, too. Taking cues from Monkey Island’s beloved dialogue is daunting, but Loco Motive manages to be funny without being cringe, helpful without being patronising, and provides a unique voice for each character to make the entire cast shine, even the extremely minor ones. A murder-mystery game like this relies on its colourful cast, after all, and Loco Motive doesn’t disappoint in that regard, with some excellent voice-acting provided by an impressive haul of actors, including the wonderful Samantha Béart (Karlach! From Baldur’s Gate 3!) as April, comedian Alasdair Beckett-King as basically himself, and a spot-on drunken Orson Welles caricature from acting veteran Jim Meskimen.
And, oh, the cleverness that this game has in spades! Let’s be real: point-and-clicks are a little played out by this point, and it takes some real work to bake in something novel. Loco Motive achieves this by – minor spoilers, sorry – giving you three characters to play as, each with their own timeline, intersecting and swapping items in ways that don’t become clear until much later in the story. Right near the end, this swapping becomes a mechanic in itself, and there’s a particularly cool moment where your inventories get confiscated, and you have to make do with items that you’ve nicked instead. It’s all just very smart.
Of course, it’s a point-and-click game, so there’s bound to be some frustrations, and yes, some of the puzzle solutions feel arbitrary and/or obtuse, even if that’s sort of the whole point of point-and-clicks. Largely, the game’s signposting is pretty good, and the hint line does a lot of the heavy lifting there, but there were times when even the hint line didn’t have anything for the exact situations we were in. We ended up relying on a walkthrough provided by the devs, but there are walkthroughs on the internet that you can use, too. It’s up to you whether you think walkthroughs are part and parcel of the joy of point-and-clicks.
Adding to that frustration are the bugs, unfortunately. In many ways, this game is as slick as a greased-up train track, but that just makes the bumps even more obvious – like when we got stuck because our save game had reverted us to an earlier chapter with all the items from the chapter after it. We had to restart the whole game to fix that one, which was not fun, although it did highlight the usefulness of the cutscene skip and dialogue skip features. There was another bug that made our character immediately leave a room we needed to go through, which stymied our progress for a good long while, because we thought it was part of the puzzle. Nope! ‘Twas a bug.
As it stands, then, Loco Motive is a truly incredible and worthy member of the point-and-click comedy murder-mystery genre that we just can’t fully recommend until a couple more patches have gone out. We really don’t have many problems with the game itself – we loved the characters, loved the art, and even loved the puzzles as we banged our heads against them – but those bugs cost us hours of progress, and it sucks to have to put on the brakes just as you’re gaining momentum. Every time we had to reboot the game, the studio’s logo – ROBUST GAMES – felt like an ironic taunt. But given that this is the dev’s debut game, and given that the team has the support of indie titans Chucklefish, we have every confidence that there’s light at the end of this tunnel, and those bugs will get squashed like a penny on a railway track in no time.
Conclusion
Loco Motive combines wit, charm, smarts, and its own brand of pixel art perfection to provide a point-and-click murder mystery that’s well worthy of its predecessors. The game’s state at launch is a little too marred by bugs for an unqualified recommendation on Switch, but give it time and we think it’ll be right back on track.
