Today: train simNIMBY Rails.
I am not a train person.
I like travelling on trains.
But games about trains always passed me by.
Not even the classics of the genre nor acclaimed descendants likeopenTTDhave ever grabbed me.
So I started playingNIMBY Railsalmost as a joke.
Then I coughed, and two hours had passed.
It is dangerously engrossing.
The idea is brilliant.
The whole damn world is your canvas, stripped of existing trains and activity.
Instead, there is potential, and obstacles.
The potential is all those people living pointless, train-free lives.
The obstacles are roads, mountains, and bodies of water.
Wildlife and architects are out of luck though.
I have ruined villages, blotted landscapes, and destroyed almost as many schools as neoliberalism.
But you must steer those tracks over roads in ways that work.
Some crossings are assumed as part of the cost, but there are limits.
A train might not run directly over a motorway or entire city centre.
But a snaking path that switches to a tramline, then a viaduct over the river, then back?
Let’s build one outside Lidl, too, and set up a completely free line just for her.
It will even name the station over a local landmark.
That’s the major appeal.
Unlike the stripped back, minimalistic abstraction ofMini Metro’s big cities, this is the real world.
You don’t need to build society from nothing.
I started by building a line dedicated to transporting the people of Marsh Green to absolutely anywhere else.
Don’t call me a hero.
But things are so simple to start with that none of it is overwhelming.
I figured everything out without reading a word of tutorial or tips.
Just clicking around a bit.
Its just entered early access, so has room for better controls, and some text fields are finnicky.
But my word, I can’t believe how quickly I became engrossed in NIMBY Rails.
