I thought Locomoto would be the perfect game for me amidst the Switch 2 chaos. With all the excitement of opening new games and speeding around the track in Mario Kart World, I needed something much slower, calmer, and cosier.
And, for the first five hours, Locomoto slotted into that role perfectly. You’re the conductor of your own train which you use to ride across a surprisingly sprawling countryside setting, populated by anthropomorphic characters. It’s Animal Crossing-meets-train sim, but with a focus on community building and quests.
You spend most of the game helping residents with their problems, driving them around, and delivering mail. You get paid in tokens which you use to buy materials (which you can also harvest with tools) to craft furniture. Initially, I adored this gameplay loop. I could take my time making my train look pretty and give my passengers the comfiest seats. I enjoyed talking to the characters because each of them had their own personal dramas that often spilled out.
It’s all very low stakes, and that works for a 5-10 hour game, but Locomoto is more than double that if you take time to do deliveries and quests. When every train journey is the same rotation, and every task is some variant of a fetch quest, it’s no longer relaxing, it’s exhausting. Eventually, I just marked my destination on my map and popped my Switch down to let the journey carry on, occasionally checking to see if I needed to fuel up.
The customisation is hugely impressive, and you can create the cutest animal avatar of your dreams. I went for a red panda named Ruby, because c’mon, look at how irresistible they are. There are tons of clothes to collect throughout the game too, and I was changing outfits basically every hour.
You can decorate your train too, filling it with furniture or painting the outside. It’s another great little way of expressing yourself in-game, but it’s a little awkward, with stiff-feeling controls as you try to shift furniture across the grid-based decoration system. And if your train is too long, then forget about painting those back carriages.
Lastly, while the game’s pastel look is lovely, performance is a little shaky on Switch, even after a day-one patch. Most of the time, it runs at sub-30fps, with weather, busier train journeys, and late-game stations tanking that more. There are also visual bugs too, like suitcases appearing on train tracks, missing textures, characters walking in mid-air, and items spawning inside characters. If you have a Switch 2, play it on there — the game runs at 60fps, and looks better as a result.
Locomoto is clearly a game that puts the ‘vibes’ first. For a slice of its runtime, it was perfectly pleasant, but by the end, I was running on fumes. Yet, if it’s a sedate and steady adventure with solid characters and a cosy atmosphere you’re after, you’ll love this. Just don’t expect a lot of variety.
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