Railway builder Station to Station harnesses the joy of minimalism
Some of this year’s best games are very complex. Baldur’s Gate 3 packed with complicated menus and endless story and combat possibilities; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives players a litany of ways to solve puzzles thanks to the plentiful Zonai devices. These games are among my favorites, but they have also sparked in me an equal and opposite desire for simplicity, for games with leaner game mechanics and more relaxed play, like Dorfromantik or Unpack.
Fortunately, the railway builder sim Station to station nails that simplicity. The game takes the tactile pleasure of placing railways and places it in an absolutely beautiful voxel art style. The rules are simple: build stations and lay tracks between outposts, each requiring and producing different goods. Connect a mill to a bakery and connect to a city. As each successful connection is made, you earn a little money, which you then spend to build more stations and tracks. Longer tracks are more expensive, as are tracks that require a bridge (for example, to bridge the gap between two rock walls).
Where other relaxed strategy sim games can push players to new levels of complexity, Station to station meets the premise of minimalist convenience. Outposts that are essential to someone else’s production do not need to be connected consecutively; outposts just need to be connected somewhere along the same train loop. For example, your track doesn’t have to go from wheat farm to mill, to bakery to city. You could instead take it from mill to town, from wheat farm to bakery, and you’d still beat the level. Especially you can complicate the game by trying to win “stacking bonuses” – which reward players for connecting outposts in a certain order – but I’ve largely avoided this in favor of a smooth time.
Instead, I spend a lot Station to station Playtime simply zoomed in on my trains passing by. You can zoom in enough to enjoy the smallest details of the voxel style art – from the small houses around a city center to the voxels with trees. The sound design only adds to this feeling of tranquility; Laying down numbers is accompanied by a clear sound, and success is accompanied by a beautiful clink of earned coins. It’s a very pleasant time, perfect for decompressing or achieving a flow state while watching trains glide by.