Choo-Choo Charles
Choo-Choo Charles is Third-Person shooter horror hybrid made in the Unreal Engine by Two Star Games. Released for PC and all major consoles in 2022, it was meet with middling reviews at the time despite extensive notoriety on social media. Players must locate three eggs scattered across an island while armed cultist protect them. To make things worse Choo-Choo Charles; pure nightmare fuel in the form of a spider train, is stalking the player every step of the way. From a technical stand point only Charles itself is really the only stand out feature. I'll focus on a core stable of navigational gameplay, the navigational indicator.
The game revolves around two primary systems; a fairly generic first person walking simulator, and train travel. The game takes place on an island ringed with train tracks. The developers made getting around deliberately slow on foot and useless for escaping Charles. This creates a dynamic where the player can't stray too far from their train lest they find themselves at the mercy of Charles. With the objective of the game split between avoiding Charles and collecting three eggs it’s really that first goal that is enjoyable. The difficulty in collecting an egg doesn't come from intentional design of the game but rather the deficit in the mandatory stealth elements. All the eggs are protected by armed cultists and the player is at the mercy of the shaky sneak mechanics to get past them. Thankfully dodging Charles is a genuine pleasure. He's big, he's fast, and he’s intimidating. The game has a great bark system for Charles that forewarns player that they need to run, get to their train, and prepare to fight. And to hear it described you'd probably think that always knowing when Charles is coming leeching all the fear form the experience...but Choo-Choo Charles doesn't rely on jump scares or under powering the player. It relies on Charles; the unholy skittering offspring of Thomas the Tank Engine and Shelob.
Leaning into a light mix of classic controls and simplified mechanics, Choo-Choo Charles has a relatively shallow learning curve and only a brief tutorial section, unfortunately that also means there's not a great deal of variety in terms of gameplay leaving little to draw players back for multiple playthroughs. At a brisk five hours of game Choo-Choo Charles is a tight one off experience. Even with the upgrade mechanic for the player's train there isn't enough depth to it to make a difference. The upgraded train does looks positively Mad Max-esque though. The game is well worth the experience but the price point can be fairly high compared to other similar games in the genre.
The game performed quite well on minimal hardware, its minimalist aesthetic doesn't make graphics cards quake in fear and that's a nice bar of entry of light PC builds and laptops. The game environments are rich and well populated with terrain bolstering plus a mix of mines, camps, and buildings. The Interface is light; basically just a health bar for the player and one for their train, there is a very detailed real-time world map, but the developers clearly put a much larger studio’s worth of effort into the animations of Charles and the various cutscenes.
Human models are more of a mixed bag. There are a number of voiced characters; enemies and NPC's alike, but there are no facial animations which is jarring at times. Given that the island is in a kind of perpetual night the lighting is solid if a bit one note. The gorgeous skyboxes alleviate most of that though. The sound design is good; the island feels spooky and there is excellent ambient sound and low eerie music to build suspense. It’s a nice lo-fi feel and that compliments the SFX during the ramp-up in action. The voice acting is solid, so is the overall sound design. Gun fire had solid physicality and the warped steam whistle of Charles is a particularly nice touch in terms of sound effects.
The player steps into the shoes of "The Archivist", a monster hunter, summoned by Eugene to destroy the monster terrorizing the island of Aranearum. The game is filled out by the locals of Aranearum which fall into one of two camps; the cultists, and the resistance. The cultists follow the islands mining magnate Warren Charles the Third who seeks to use Choo-Choo Charles to conquer the world. The resistance; including Eugen, his son Paul, and others are trying to kill the beast, Charles. There are also the citizens of Aranearum, the last holdouts on the island just trying to just survive.
The island itself is fairly large with a number of rail tracks and sidings, wooden buildings, barns, docks, caves, and mines. The terrain is nice and detailed with a mix of trees and grasses. Mostly the map is barren to accommodate Charles' movements around the map. My only complaint is the pallet used to build the environment is limited, I understand coming from a solo developer.
The story is simple; collect three eggs, kill the monster. The primary obstacles being armed cultist protecting the eggs and Choo-Choo Charles. There are side missions to flesh out the game length. The rewards are a new weapon or scrap, required to repair and upgrade the players train. The Ending of Choo-Choo Charles is a gem, it's a straight forward boss battle capped off by a high quality cutscene and even an after credit scene.
Choo-Choo Charles has few post game frills. After the credits roll players have seen most of what the game has to offer. There is a Nightmare mode that makes several mechanical and aesthetic changes to the game; perma-death, new soundtracks, and a generally darker atmosphere with reduced visibility. There's no New Game+ mode and currently no Downloadable content or plans for a sequel. In terms of game Achievements, each quest (main quests, side quests, and weapons quests), there is the obligatory achievement for completing the game, and a set for fully upgrading the train and its weapons. All-in-all it isn’t an inspired list of achievements, but more than functional.
The game's middling reviews make the prospect of a sequel less and less likely, which is to disappointing given that it is a quality game despite its flaws. A few hind sight changes could have made a big difference. More polish to the stealth mechanics, a few more activities to be performed while travelling aboard the train, and more built out mission set with more variety and longer multipart objectives.
So the aspect I wanted to deconstruct is the vector and distance to the pinned objective that appears on the player's HUD. It is a neat interplay between the overworld map system; where the player can pin any coordinates in the playable area or any open event based map pin, and then have the direction and distance to that pin. This represents a 3D coordinate with the basic trigonometry distance calculation.
There are two elements to consider the origin and the destination. These two objects are all we need in principle. The coordinates of the destination is easy, just an X, Y, Z coordinate. If vertical height isn't a substantial factor, like on a relatively flat map then you can disregard height as a factor. The origin similarly has a point and a direction. In this example the Unity camera Object will serve as the origin point and we can leverage Unity's object system to get everything we need. First is the position; a Vector3, simple X, Y, Z coordinates. With this alone we can find the distance to the objective.
From these two coordinates we can also calculate the relative angles between them relative to the axis' forming a triangle. A bit of trigonometry can give us all the angles and values we need for the final step, that being process is to render an indicator on screen for the player. I elected to paint my indicator as an object and have it circle around the player in between them and the destination. This method included updating the indicator as the player moves and through Unity’s engine rotates. One special step I’ve added is to have the indicator hide itself once the player is within a certain range of their destination.