Spooky Express

🔹 EXPECTATIONS: a family friendly version of Cosmic express. 🔹 REALITY: a family friendly and more approachable version of Cosmic express. 🔶 Spooky express is a pathfinding and logic game where you lay train tracks for the train to follow, onboarding passengers and taking them to their destination. It's a spiritual successor to Cosmic express, but a standalone game at the same time: you don't need to play one before the other. 🔸 It's hard to talk about Spooky express without comparing it to it's predecessor, Cosmic express, so for the sake of format and length I'll just say it surpasses it in almost every aspect: music, storytelling, mechanics and passengers variety. TL;DR: Cosmic is good, Spooky is better. 🔸 The game has a horror theme but represented in a family friendly way with cute characters and environments in a vibrant colour palette. There is a bit of a story, told through comic strips, that appear between the 8 worlds, and work as an introduction of each new mechanic and theme. 🔸 Each world has around 20 levels, for a total of 220, but they unlock in sets of increasing difficulty (or at once from the settings menu), so one only needs to finish the very basic ones to reach the ending. The difficulty curve increases gently and ranges from very easy to hard. 🔸 There's more variety of mechanics here than in Cosmic, so it's not just about taking passengers in and dropping them off. The different characters aren't just a change of skin, either, they have unique behaviours and requisites, and react differently to each other. 🔸 In general there's been an effort to make the game more accessible to a wider audience: the train updates its state in real time, which helps keep 'track' of the result of the current path, and I've also enjoyed the clues system, that shows a small section of the solution, without giving it away. 🔸 In short, Spooky express is an excellent game for puzzle and non-puzzle players. It's fun and funny, accessible and challenging. It makes sure no one is left behind and it can take you as far as you want it to go. POSITIVES: 🙂+ art 😄+ difficulty 😍+ mechanics variety NEGATIVES: 🙁- 😠- 😡- [quote]For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers[/url] and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group[/url].[/quote]

Difficulty : 3/5 (Rather Hard) Global : 4/5 (Great) My website : [url=https://anokturnus.review/]The Review Principle[/url] Curator page : [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44695991-Anokturnus/]Anokturnus[/url] You know, among all the Draknek & Friends games, Cosmic Express has always been the most "underdeveloped". I'm not saying it's a bad game or anything like that but when you purely look at its core, there were a few mechanics but not much going on. It settled to be a pure pathfinding game and that's all, that's why I wasn't surprised to see a "sequel" was being made. Infuse Cosmic Express with a new Halloween setting and related puzzle mechanics revolving around fear and you get Spooky Express, which we'll see is not Cosmic Express 2 and plays completely differently from its predecessor. I know it's a bit annoying but I can't really review Spooky Express without referencing Cosmic Express, sorry for that. Spooky Express opens with a first world that teaches you the basics: you drive a train and you must take all the passengers aboard, drive them to their stop and then reach the exit. The first major difference with Cosmic Express is the number of seats available in the train, you can only carry one passenger at a time. The game then proceeds to develop its mechanics, each world introducing a new one, and you immediately understand why there's only one seat in the train… it would be a bit chaotic to have more, wouldn't it? That's surely not what will happen later! Spooky Express' mechanics revolve around fear. This time, you have to be careful when you drive your passengers! If you drive in front of a monster with a human aboard and there's space on the other side, the poor human has to give up their place for example. The same is true for a monster when there is a demon nearby, and you might even be able to turn a human into a monster… the passengers and their behavior are what brings a more logical approach to the "Express" formula. Cosmic Express was a LOT of trial and error, you couldn't really deduce a lot of things just by looking at a puzzle and that was the biggest gripe people had with it. Spooky Express completely changes that, the first thing you do when entering a puzzle is actually to pause and analyze it. It's not just about dropping passengers at their stop, you need to deduce what you have to do with them before. The passengers' interactions allow for diverse and unique puzzles while also narrowing the possibilities, it helps the game feel pleasant, rewarding and not exhausting. I remember having to take lots of breaks playing Cosmic Express. Spooky Express is accessible with a very smooth difficulty curve, another consequence of the less "trial and errory" nature of the game. Don't worry though, this game is still rather hard overall if you want to complete everything. The bonus puzzles explore the mechanics as deeply as possible, and you even end up increasing the number of seats of your train in the later ones. They are not crushingly hard, but the interactions become far more complex when multiple seats are involved and you really need to be careful, it becomes super easy to give up on actually correct solutions just because you missed a tiny little thing. The fear chain reactions you have to find can be quite hard to anticipate, but the puzzles stay refined and never get too overwhelming (looking at you, final puzzle of Cosmic Express). When I hear Draknek & Friends, I can't help but think "META PUZZLES". Yes, a review without me mentioning meta puzzles is impossible I know but what can I do, this is the best type of puzzle. I was a bit disappointed to see that there are actually no meta puzzles whatsoever in Spooky Express, I think this is the first time for a Draknek & Friends game. Cosmic Express had you find alternate paths, as well as monoliths that challenged you to solve some puzzles again with heavy restrictions, at least. I guess implementing meta puzzles or something like what Cosmic Express did was too hard or out of place with this more logical formula that usually only has one solution for each puzzle. The visuals, the music and the sound design are all top notch as expected (zombies saying "traaaaaain" are my favorite thing btw), we also get super nice little comics before entering a new world. You can even still poke the decorations in the puzzles… no it's not completely useless! It feels good to poke everything when you're stuck, trust me. Anyway, Spooky Express builds upon what its big brother created to offer a more thinky and far less frustrating experience. As always, Draknek & Friends delivers with an overall very approachable and polished game that still manages to please puzzle veterans as well. Great game, highly recommended of course.

很好一笔画，玩完茜塔紧接着玩这个有一种按摩大脑皮层的放松感…… 比他们之前做的《怪兽远征》简单，比《A good snowman is hard to build》 难一点点。 拼尽全力(着急忙慌)通关了普通关卡，至于abc和xyz什么的以后看缘分叭。。。

送客火車又出新的一款，此次的機制也挺有趣 操作方式更新，變更單純只需要鋪鐵軌而以這部分非常滿意

Easily the best in the "Express" series, with the difficulty truly hitting that sweet spot.

"Traditional" puzzle games with a level select, nondescript unnamed levels, and quasi-static game elements have lost some portion of their appeal in recent years. Now that meta mechanics are known in the puzzle canon and even developing conventions (see: Gentoo Rescue), you really need to meet a stronger standard to compete with the crowd. Enter the sequel not-sequel to cosmic express, which was maybe the best such static game already. It's less cosmic express 2 and more parallel universe cosmic express. It starts out the same and then diverges into a completely different mechanic set, and by the time some basic mechanics from the first game are reintroduced, they are being used in an utterly different context. The game felt very long, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing, since the ramp up is more gradual for new players. It's easy to understand at a glance how the game works and I would often stream it to friends who would immediately be able to backseat me no matter how far in the game I was. This does make me wonder if some boards could be trimmed to get the level count down just a bit, but there wasn't anything egregiously repetitive, not really. I have my gripes with all hint systems and I still doubt that the hint system given (showing a bit of correct track) is appropriate for such a game, but I was able to ignore it. There should be a setting to hide the button (maybe on by default, hints that give that much arbitrary information should be for desperate situations only). The quality of the end game boards is consistently high, without relying on size. It did occasionally feel like the level designer got to be more clever when designing the puzzle than I got to be while stumbling into a solution, because of just how low-agency non intersecting track drawing on a medium size board is. I suppose I can't ask for more with this mechanic set, and it was explored extremely thoroughly. Art and music are well above standard for a Draknek&Friends game. 9/10 despite all my moaning, I'm spoiled rotten by the amazing output of these developers and others.

Spooky Express has a hundred or so well-crafted puzzles that seem immensely complex at first, but can be simplified with a mix of logical deduction and inspiration. The difficulty curve is just right; there are plenty of easy-ish puzzles, but the puzzles get really hard towards the end. On top of that, the presentation is delightful. [i]Comparison to prequel Cosmic Express[/i] Cosmic express had two weaknesses which are both fixed in Spooky express. First, there were some arbitrary rules about resolving ties when multiple aliens could hop in the same train car. This is handled much better in Spooky express, in a way that makes logical sense and leads to good puzzles. Second, in cosmic express you had to first draw the track, then press a button to start the train. In Spooky express, the train automatically advances as you draw the track, making the solving process more fluid.

괴물, 사람, 악마가 만나면 어떤 일이 일어날까요? 귀여운 캐릭터들이 충돌하고, 도망가는 가운데 모든 승객을 안내하는 기차 퍼즐입니다. 처음에는 간단한 기찻길 그리기로 시작합니다. 좀비는 묘지에, 뱀파이어는 관에 데려다줍니다. 그리고 새로운 승객이 등장하고, 새로운 규칙을 배웁니다. 어떤 캐릭터를 먼저 태우고, 어떤 경로로 이동해야 할까? 괴물과 사람 사이에 벌어지는 일을 예상하면 기찻길 하나로 모든 퍼즐을 풀 수 있습니다. 게임이 복잡하지 않아 절망적으로 어려운 퍼즐은 없습니다. 다 한눈에 보이는 게임판이고, 칸도 큼직큼직합니다. '이 작은 퍼즐이 왜 안 풀리지?' 하고 끙끙대다가, 다음에 다시 켜면 새로운 발상으로 풀 수 있습니다. 게임판에 있는 관이나 묘지 개수, 정거장 위치를 단서로 해답을 찾아가는 재미도 있습니다. 배우기 쉽고, 편안하고 재미있는 퍼즐입니다. 도전 과제 100% 달성은 모든 퍼즐을 풀면 됩니다.

ルーカス・ル・スロ！ 知るかぎり最高のパズルデザイナーの一人。

Excellent puzzles all the way through. Easy recommend. I completed it together with my 10y/o and he loved it as well. Easy recommend.