If fancy somewhere new and exciting to clean after six months tidying your flat day after day after day, Train Station Renovation might do it for you. It’s a game about fixing stations up to be all shiny and new, clearing away rubbish, filth, satanic shrines, and graffiti, fixing machinery, replacing furniture and fittings, and redecorating. It’s more like the canned cleanup of House Flipper than the physics-simulated chaos of Viscera Cleanup Detail, which isn’t what I’m personally after, but I know our Alice Bee dug it. Today, after five months in early access, the game has launched in full.

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Videogames. Wow, what a concept. Crackling portals to distant lands. Doorways inviting us to impossible places and barbarous shores. Psychedelic imaginationariums fuelled by the limitless potential of raw human creativity. Time machines folding history in on itself, over and over, until the beginning cannot be told apart from the end, like the infinite buttery layers of a viennoiserie pastry formed of unleavened millennia and, christ, I don’t know, chronoflour>? Anyway, I think you get the point, this week I have been playing the delightfully mundane metro sanitation sim Train Station Renovation.

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Train Station Renovation

is coming out on Steam Early Access later this week. If it sounds like the sort of game published by PlayWay, you are correct, because it is. I was initially intrigued by it because train simulation games and renovation simulation games are both quietly but enduringly popular. The idea of a crossover between the two felt both odd and necessary at the same time.

It is a game where you go to derelict train stations and un-derelict them, picking up rubbish and replacing furniture and what have you. It sounds quite boring, and honestly it sort of is, except it also sort of isn’t. Having played the first couple of levels, I can confirm that Train Station Renovation, far from being mundane, feels frankly bizarre. It has left me with nothing but questions. And lots of screenshots of sweet, sweet graffiti. (more…)