Locomoto review — Coziness at its most boring

Cozy games often get a bad reputation for lacking meaningful gameplay and being ‘boring.’ These types of games focus on the smaller, mundane tasks you find in everyday life, from farming and decorating to pulling weeds. You won’t find your fast, brutal combat with guns and swords here. These are slow games meant for relaxation; they are perfect for unwinding when life gets a bit too hectic, micro-managing this little digital world that I’m in charge of. Playing one whilst having a Nintendo music compilation on, or whilst I’m watching my partner play games on the TV, is time that I think everyone needs, and that’s why I raise my eyebrow at those who judge cozy gamers. However, even after this heartfelt speech about why cozy games rock, you can get ones that are recipes for disaster, and unfortunately, my life as a train conductor in Locomoto was the full course meal.

Locomoto is simple in concept and has the makings of a perfect unwind game. You’re a cute animal train conductor who, with your friend Finley, will revitalize the train system that runs throughout the landscape. You’ll run your train by pumping coal into its furnace and decorating to your heart’s content with a bunch of furniture, wallpaper, flooring, and all that fun jazz. Villagers that inhabit different settlements board your fully stylized train, and you’ll take them to their chosen destinations. You’ll also perform more menial tasks like transporting parcels. Locomoto’s story and quests come in the form of helping different townsfolk with their many different problems. In Barrenpyre, you’ll be revitalizing the town after a long buildup of pollution.

From the first hour, you’ll come to realize that the gameplay of Locomoto is incredibly simple and repetitive. It’s all fetch quests, with characters asking you to go talk to this person five villages over or transport this item to another village. It’s standard stuff, and despite seeming repetitive, once you get a few quests and story missions, you’ll be stopping off at every settlement to tick off something on your to-do list. 

After 6 hours of playtime, I felt sluggish in my desire to do tasks as cracks started appearing in the gameplay. Characters would ask you to talk to someone for them, but as characters seem to be able to get up and go whenever they please, sometimes they’ll just be standing right next to them. Towards the end of the first area, I also found that chugging along to different towns annoying, as a story mission could have you going on a wild goose chase. You just stop and start at different locations and move on. Delivering parcels became annoying, traversal became annoying, and despite not having touched the next area, I felt like I was already done with what Locomoto had to offer.

The characters themselves are okay; they all have finely written dialogue, but nothing that made me love any of them. A lot of them become fodder for the story mission, and after pedaling them around half the area, I didn’t feel any closer to them than I did at the start.

The train itself is fun, and I can see a lot of players having fun decorating it. You get train furniture through blueprints that characters give you, then you craft them using different resources. Each settlement will have unique resources that you can collect and can be obtained through tools left on the ground or ones that you are gifted by others that you can keep on your train. I’m personally not a massive fan of crafting systems and found collecting resources more boring than exciting. 

This wasn’t helped by how frustrating the crafting is. You have a 4×4 crafting table on your train that makes dingy furniture, but if you want nicer furniture, you need a bigger crafting table. These can only be found in two settlements on the map, so if I wanted to build a nice table, I’d need to haul myself all the way to that destination. Why! 

I also didn’t like how resources affected how your furniture looks. Normally, in cozy games, if you want to change the color scheme of an item, you have a dedicated decoration bench or something like that. In Locomoto, if you use a specific wood or metal, that’s what color it ends up coming out as. For example, if you use oak wood and copper bars for a chair, you’ll get that combo of colors. It’s  clumsy in function; this meansI needed to go back to one specific area for a certain type of wood whenever I wanted a particular color.

Other tasks on the train include regularly maintaining a steady supply of coal and seeing if passengers want anything to eat, and that’s about it. Traversal was fine at first when I had a bunch of stuff to do, but as I was checking off a bunch of stuff on the checklist, I found waiting to get to each location dreadfully boring. The locations found in Locomoto are also nothing to write home about. Apart from the main town of each location, each settlement is one house and maybe one other point of interest. You can walk around one in about 10 steps. This just made the locations forgettable and bland to look at. Maybe it would have been better for both characters and locations if you could go into their houses, or if more characters lived in one settlement—it reminded me of the simplicity of My Sims Kingdom, but much worse.

Everything I’ve described is wrapped up in a rather ugly 3D art style. I’ve seen a lot of creators praise it, but it doesn’t float my boat—or should I say train? The characters look weird and not at all cute with their beady eyes and fat bodies. You can customize your character for the game and dress them up in different pieces of clothing you find and get given in the overworld; there are a bunch of options to choose from, so there’s some fun to be had there. Of course cozy games need to be fun in terms of gameplay, but what really grabs me initially is the art style. These types of games all have very similar gameplay, so if they haven’t got that artistic edge, then I won’t bother.

Finally, and most egregiously, are the performance issues that plagued my short time with Locomoto. I really wanted to push past the first area to see what the next one had in store, but there are only so many crashes a girl can take. I played Locomoto on my Nintendo Switch 2 but encountered numerous bugs where I would arrive at a destination, but the screen would just freeze. I would have to restart the game and do that journey all over again. At this point, I was just mopping up some loose ends, which meant rather long journeys to specific locations, and if the game crashed, I would feel my patience tethered even further. It happened way too many times, and after a ponder on the internet, it seems this has been a problem on this platform for a while, so blaming me for not waiting for a patch is rather unfair. It cut my time short with Locomoto, clocking in at about 6 hours and stopping right at the end of the first area. Maybe there’s more fun to be had later on, but I don’t care enough to find out.

Other bugs were stylistic, but still an eyesore during my time with this game. Characters’ eyes would be fully white, making them look like demons straight out of my nightmares; characters would be holding out something for me to grab, but there wouldn’t actually be anything there. This could also be said for tools that I’d drop on the floor, sometimes just vanishing into thin air. I was customizing how many wagons I wanted on my train in a later part of the area, put a carriage on a table, and left to go to my train to get some resources. By the time I came back, the wagon had vanished, and so had every piece of decoration in that space. Let’s say I wasn’t pleased. Finally, every piece of grass, flower, and whatever else would constantly be popping in and out of existence in each location I visited. Not the end of the world, but still jarring.

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