RailGods of Hysterra is an interesting take on the survival crafting genre, tasking players with surviving a Lovecraftian apocalypse and maintaining a sentient, otherworldly god train as you ride the endless rails. The game is clearly designed with a lot of imagination, and the premise alone will be a major draw for new fans looking for a creative spin on a familiar genre. However, the game is still in early access, and there is much work to be done before it is ready for a complete launch, something I became acutely aware of as I played it.
The premise of RailGods of Hysterra is anything but simple. You are a Dreamer, essentially one of the surviving members of a doomsday cult created by the author H.P. Lovecraft, who has managed to survive an eldritch apocalypse that has rendered the world into a state of incomprehensible madness. You have bound yourself to a Railgod, a terrible beastly god fused with a machine, a train to be precise, that serves as your base of operations as you carry out your grim work in the world that once was but is now twisted beyond recognition.
The core gameplay concept of RailGods of Hysterra is simple but pretty cool. As the conductor of your train, you must keep yourself and your train fed, with food keeping you alive and mush from slain enemies serving as fuel for your train. You travel from location to location, limited by how far your train can go, and explore the procedurally generated levels to gather supplies and whatever unique resource or treasure awaits in that particular land. Bringing these resources back to the Railgod, you discover new blueprints, craft better gear, and expand your train. All of the base building takes place on your train cars, building new walls, furniture, and crafting locations within the confines of the train, which adds a fun constraint that makes planning feel meaningful.
There is a multiplayer element to the game, but I was unable to play it, so all of my experience was in solo.
All in all, it is a solid concept. The presence of eldritch and Lovecraftian themes gives the game some fun and unique visual flair, with creepy fish people and mad cultists stalking the plains you explore. Tying your base building and progression to a sentient train is a fun twist on the genre’s core gameplay loop. It helps keep things fresh in a space that often feels overcrowded with similar ideas.
In practice, however, I found that progression in the current state of RailGods of Hysterra is unbearably slow. From what I have found, most areas feel as though exploration is pointless, with resources essentially being the same everywhere. You are really only getting out of the train to get meat fuel once you have gathered a good stock of basic resources, which happened for me after my first stop.
I am not sure if there was some problem with the game’s level generation, but I quickly found myself blocked from progress due to a lack of caves spawning on the map, areas I needed to gather copper and finish my early train upgrades. Because I was not progressing in the quests I needed to communicate with towns, and because nowhere I went spawned the resources I needed, I quickly found myself stuck in a loop of only being able to gather enough fuel for my train to make it to the next area, where I would be disappointed to discover there was nothing useful except more fuel for my train. This repeated process became tedious, and the sense of discovery wore thin much faster than I expected.
Combat is fairly boring, and death loops in RailGods of Hysterra, regardless of my personal situation, are pretty common. In the game’s current state, dodging has a harsh cooldown, and enemies move fairly quickly and very hard. Most basic enemies you will have no problems with, but their tendency to hook up with other large groups of roaming enemies into one big mass and then back you into a corner can create some rather unfun situations. This is made worse when you run into the error that causes your gravesite not to mark on your map, essentially causing you to lose your entire backpack full of loot, which, to be fair, was mostly just meat fuel for your train.
This was far from the only glitch I experienced while playing the game. Terrain textures in certain areas were not implemented properly, causing some flashes and glitches. My blueprint for an iron scrap pickaxe did not actually craft a pickaxe, but crafted more blueprints for one instead, which was confusing and disappointing. Playing the game on DX12, despite meeting the system requirements, caused a crash in my audio and graphics drivers when loading new levels that forced me to restart my PC. These kinds of issues stack up quickly and make the experience feel unstable overall, even though the core idea behind everything is genuinely cool.
A lot of work needs to be done on RailGods of Hysterra. I am not surprised in the least to see that my copy of the game, a build released for critics before the game has even entered its public testing phase officially, had its problems. The game has some good ideas, so I hope not only that the bugs are quickly sorted, but that the game is expanded upon with more content and some tweaks to the gameplay that make it a bit more exciting. I want to see this title succeed because its foundation is strong, even if its current state is rough. That being said, I am sure RailGods of Hysterra will be a far greater game when it finishes its early access cycle and realizes its full potential.
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