I’m sitting here at work and just thinking about this game I played during Nextfest. It is not pivotal in terms of gameplay or looks, it was just that it was super fun to build train tracks. I was never a train person, but once I played this demo for 15 minutes, I just wanted to play more. Maybe I just like dad games. I always really liked games where the world is yours to build it however you want and this week’s game is right up mine and pretty much everyone’s alley.

This week is Islands & Trains

Islands & Trains is a cozy sandbox city builder from Akos Makovics and Future Friends Games. The game will be released for the PC at a later date (Hopefully 2025).

THE POINT OF THE GAME IS TO BE COZY AND JUST BUILD.

Islands & Trains is your run-of-the-mill sandbox game. You are dropped into a tutorial about how the building works. The tutorial tells you how to place land and build it up, swing the camera, and flip objects. Once you are done with that, it is the players’ turn to build whatever their heart desires. After having my wife watch, she picked it up immediately and wanted to join in on the building because it was so easy and accessible for all kinds of players.

Islands & Trains just nails the cozy. Like a mix between Tiny Garden and Rollercoaster Tycoon in freedom to do whatever.

Islands & Trains gives the player a significant amount of space and objects to place. Obviously, there is a focus on trains here, so building train-friendly city centers is important but not mandatory. Within no time players are constructing entire cities and rural communities that have a train running through them and if that is not for you and you want to just build a goofy railway system, then that is also an option.

I don’t know train lingo but players can drop tracks, curves, and stations with ease and when it comes to more advanced things like switch systems and tracks through the environment, you can do all that too IN THE DEMO. Once you are done with the tracks you can place the train with a few cars on the track and watch it go, until you realize you need to make the environment gorgeous (and you will be able to).

Islands & Trains does such a great job of being a demo because it shows the player that they can focus on whatever they enjoy and it all works out at the end.

Islands & Trains is already a beautiful-looking video game with its lower poly design and rich colors, but when you want to beautify the space the game has anything and everything to do so. After I was happy with my half-asleep creation I decided to put trees, rocks, and animals down in the rural areas while decorating the city with streetlights, benches, and vendor wagons to make it feel more habitable. The level at which you can customize areas is outstanding.

Islands & Trains, again, is a demo that I want to play when I get home. The cozy meter is off the charts when you can sit down, listen to a podcast or music, and get lost in creating an island world with an intricate railway system. Aside from what I thought was an annoying and frustrating tutorial. Islands & Trains is superb in what it already does in the demo.

Hopefully, the demo stays up after Nextfest is gone because I will be playing it more of it.