The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram.

Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.

I always wonder how a solo developer can source high quality assets like these, plus develop a full game with them. In this case did the dev create the assets or did they purchase them from a freelancer? How much would purchasing this many assets cost?

One person made the best train sim. Meanwhile AAA studios need 400 people to make the same game twice.

> including support for the Zuiki MASCON, a bespoke peripheral for train driving sims.

This just makes me feel so glad to be alive today!

In my region of the world this title (and also the title of being "the worst ever made") was reserved for the unnecessarily detailed electric locomotive simulator MaSzyna:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033030/MaSzyna/

Turns out that such a vehicle, even though simple in principle, has quite the startup procedure and a layman would have trouble making it go.

Game looks amazing from a solo dev but this article is terrible, like the journo didn't even play the game they just watched the game.

I like this one, too : https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/

I own it and played it. It's good, very pretty, but highly repetitive. It's one 40km track, two trains, and most of the scenery is the same. It is one step above a Unreal Engine tech demo (e.g. the matrix demo from a few years back).

For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.

This game is fantastic, it seems that Japanese train arcade / sims are having a renaissance at the moment.

It works brilliantly with the Zuiki Mascon controller.

This is a 1 person job?! It looks practically photorealistic. That's absolutely wild.

Q to the video in the middle of the article:

Is THIS the in-game graphics of the game??

If Yes - just WOW!!

How much AI did the person use?

"Played properly, Running Train asks you to carefully control your speed, braking, and prompt, safe arrival at train stations, and rewards or penalizes you accordingly"

So it's basically a clone of 'Densha de go!' series.

I bought it yesterday, not too hard to get running on linux, and played for an hour, it's immense fun.

The game in question is https://store.steampowered.com/app/4630570/RUNNING_TRAIN/

The article says the game should cost 18$ (should be ~15.74€), but it's actually showing as 19.50€ aka 22.29 USD. Does anyone know what's going on there? Is Stream charging more due to refund laws or something?

I can't find a website for the developer, also nothing listed in the Indonesian Wikipedia article. Sadly no way to buy it directly and give them 100% of the money in their currency

I fell down a YouTube hole and watched all of these Derail Valley playthroughs: https://youtu.be/JSONttyEJ4o

Highly recommend if you like having something interesting on in the background.

I wonder if it's got VR. There's not many train Sims that do even though the sim community in general has really embraced VR.

I have almost no appreciation for trains and I’m incredibly interested in trying this.

Microsoft used to have "Microsoft Train Simulator". It was being shown off at E3 in 2001 in a dark little corner, by this older gentlemen who for I know may have been the producer or main developer.

I'm not into trains, but I felt bad for this guy so I spent 15 minutes at his booth and let him show me everything. It seemed to have made his day.

> one-person development team

:)

Looks great. Too bad that steam deck isn’t supported, I hope they’ll add it.

This YouTube is a pretty good walk through of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxGEMOzWt8w

I never got the appeal for these sim games. From the screenshots, it looks like a beautiful game and I guess I could enjoy the visuals for an hour or 2.

But I don't see how it'd entertain me for hours on end. If someone here is into these sim games, what's the reason you keep going back to them?

> is in fact set in a fictional region of Japan, but is created so lovingly that you’ll believe it’s real life.

This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.

Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.

> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.

OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.

Another notable, if old, train simulator from Japan is OpenBVE. It was easy to model railroads on it. Many short Brazilian routes were/are modeled in OpenBVE. It is particularly convincing since it simulates well the typical lateral wobbling that metric trains are known for.

Very impressive! Well done

Looks beautiful and I am filled with an instant sense of nostalgia looking at the screenshots.

Personally if I were going to adopt a nerdy train hobby, I would tend more toward train photography. Recently train photographers have been in the news for mostly bad reasons [1], but I have also seen train photographers setting up in rural locations and the scenery looks stunning and also totally chill. The problems arise when people gather en masse to get the "iconic" shots that have been probably been photographed a million times before.

Or just go out and actually ride a bunch of different routes. It's been a long time since I've done it, but just riding a local or express train through a scenic area is delightful.

Of course there's no reason that true train afficianados can't do all of the above, as well as building model trains!

[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/12/15/japanese-railway-pleads-wit...

So is it fun to play or just fun to look at? I'm getting "Mixtape" vibes from the article (not good!)

Unreal 5 is amazing with photo realism. Bodycam uses this feature well too

Windows only? :-(

It’s beautiful. I wonder how much an LLM was involved if at all.

I read the title and assumed this was going to be about Transport Tycoon.

>And oh my goodness, it’s so pretty.

Am I the only one that thinks the word "pretty" is overused to describe the visual quality and artistry of games? I see this word thrown around often and it feels so low-effort.

Looks very realistic, however I have to question the whole premise of a train sim, trains seem to be the most boring vehicle to choose here, they run in tracks so not much freedom, basically accelerate and brake.