The 9:00 AM Train, by tzbits
The 9:00 AM Train is either a thriller or a meditation on grace; I’m tempted to say that I’d like it more if it made up its mind, but then again, I might not.
This is a parser game that flirts with minimalism. You’re an unnamed character waiting in a station for the eponymous train, starting to sweat because you’re not quite sure where to pick up your ticket. There’s not much scenery or much to do – the counter isn’t staffed, there are hundreds of people milling around which is to say there’s nobody in particular around – and the details of who you are and what you’re up to are left vague: you’re dressed as a tourist, but where you are, and whether you’re coming or going, are left entirely unsettled. As you start to poke around for lack of anything better to do, you can run afoul of some creepy ROT-13 spouting guards, or you can help out a stranger, at which point you get a text message indicating that outside events have rendered your quest for a seat on the train rather more urgent. As the danger ramps up, answers remain unforthcoming, nor does the ending shine any more light.
This vagueness, I think, undercuts the thriller plot – we don’t know the stakes in general, and we have no reason to care about the protagonist in particular (for all we know, maybe the ending would be a happier one if some member of the anonymous crowd had gotten that last train seat in our stead!) But it does create space for a more metaphysical engagement with the game. Events proceed in a liminal place where nothing is fixed, except when a moment of empathy creates a connection with another character, likewise creating a spark of specificity. An early good deed becomes, unlooked-for, the only reason you have a chance of salvation, and another key event hinges on a bond you create with another character over your ability to speak German, a language taught to you by your mother, whose death you’re still grieving. And this isn’t just me imposing my Catholic upbringing on the game, it’s very aware of its key theme:
“Sometimes we are given grace and others are not. Whether you call it lucky breaks or grace is a matter of personal taste. But regardless, what you have to accept is that sometimes you have no control over who receives it.”
But back to the thriller side of the equation – it’s still there, and is responsible for the plot and most of the business of gameplay. The brisk prose and penchant for talismanic repetition are a reasonable fit for both parts of the game, but in other respects 9:00 AM Train’s attempts to serve two masters are awkward. In particular, the puzzles struck me as a bit underclued both in the abstract and in context. One relies on a particular verb that most modern IF doesn’t rely on (though admittedly the action list in the HELP text does indicate it’s a possibility) and there’s another where you’re only told a key fact about your surroundings when you perform an unrelated action. In a puzzle-focused game, these would be mildly annoying bits of friction, quickly surmounted, but in a meditation on how the Lord sendeth it to rain on the just and unjust alike, it rather took me out of the mood to be wandering around the map, Xing everything in sight and trial-and-erroring my way through the verb list. Similarly, it’s hard to take the ROT13 stuff seriously.
I don’t want to be too much of a grump here, though – part of the fun of the game is seeing what it’s up to, and the fact that it spends a reasonable chunk of its time behaving for all the world like a simple action story plays a big part in that fun. Contrariwise, the moral insights here are not, I think, especially deep – though they have a lot of personal appeal to me – so ensuring the player has something to do other than nit-pick them is the right choice. So the 9:00 AM Train is very much worth catching, even if the grade could have been a bit smoother in places.
9 am train mr.txt (41.6 KB)