I’ve felt surprisingly mixed so far about Frostrail, the new first-person co-op horror survival game from the folks behind Barotrauma. As a rule, I’m keen on stories about awful apocalypse trains – see Metro Exodus, RailGods, and recent Julian favourite Fogpiercer – but Frostrail has hitherto seemed a bit generic. Certainly, a bit generic for a game from the people who made a game that inspired write-ups like this one.

The announcement trailer suggested a dowdy routine of chugging between resource spots and shooting a few dozen ice zombies while backpedalling towards your upgradeable locomotive. Thankfully, this week’s new gameplay overview adds a few layers of mystique, delving into catacombs where the vegetation is lusher, the architecture a bit Tomb Raidery, and the horror, less explicable. You’ll get into certain of these sunken spaces by way of abandoned churches, which reminded me a little of the altar puzzle in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Anyway, here’s the video.

I can’t knock the game’s backstory writing. “Once a mighty empire, the land now lies barren, consumed by an unrelenting cold,” explains the Steam page. “Twisted by the Emperor’s pact with the Void, its ruins are haunted by relentless revenants and eldritch horrors. Aboard an armored, steam-powered train, the Penitent Gardeners purge the land of the cursed, granting mercy to the lost and striking down the wicked, seeking salvation in the heart of the frozen desolation.”

Yes! I have always wanted to be a Penitent Gardener, and not just the everyday, lower-case kind who forgets to sow the potatoes in time and hack back the raspberries before the winter.

Frostrail is out in early access sometime this year. If you missed Barotrauma for lack of an appropriately tenacious and twitchy submarine crew (yes, I’m aware you can play with bots), Frostrail appears more singleplayer-friendly in that it is openly marketed as for “solo or co-op”. Still, we won’t know for sure till we play it.

Question for the thread: who would win, trains or submarines? The answer, of course, is: we shouldn’t have to choose.