Loco Motive

The point-and-click adventure genre died once. Then it died again. LucasArts abandoned it, Sierra folded, and for the better part of two decades the whole category survived on Kickstarter promises and the fumes of Monkey Island. Every so often someone tries to revive it. Most of these revivals mistake reference for wit—they know the shape of a joke without knowing why it landed.

Loco Motive, from UK indie studio Robust Games, looks like the exception. On paper, at least, it knows why those jokes landed, and it writes new ones.

The setup is pure Agatha Christie by way of Ron Gilbert. It’s the 1930s, and the eccentric railway heiress Lady Unterwald is murdered aboard her own luxury steam train, the Reuss Express, during a conveniently timed blackout. Three mismatched suspects—Arthur Ackerman, a buttoned-up estate lawyer; Herman Merman, a crime novelist who fancies himself a detective; and Diana Osterhagen, a rookie tax agent working undercover—have to clear their names before the train reaches its final stop. All three are playable, their storylines braiding together as they cross the same carriages from different angles.

That structure is the smartest thing here. A single-protagonist mystery offers one perspective. Loco Motive offers three, and the fun is in watching one character’s throwaway detail become another’s smoking gun. It’s a farce engine dressed as a whodunit.

Positioned as a mid-tier premium release on Nintendo Switch, this isn’t chasing the live-service crowd or the roguelike gold rush. It’s a finite, hand-crafted, single-player comedy—a genuinely uncommon pitch in 2026. Robust Games didn’t reinvent the wheel. They just remembered wheels are supposed to be fun.

• Three interwoven protagonists: Arthur, Herman, and Diana each carry their own chapters, tone, and puzzle logic, then collide in ways that reframe what came before.
• Diegetic telephone hint system: There’s an in-world phone hotline designed to dispense spoiler-free nudges without breaking the fiction or sending anyone to a wiki.
• Full voice acting: Every line is performed, and the cast is tasked with selling the comic timing that lesser adventure games leave stranded on the page.
• Modernized controls: Direct character movement and proper controller support replace the arthritic point-and-click cursor of the old days.
• Hand-drawn pixel art with expressive animation: Detailed 2D character work that actually acts—double-takes, slow burns, physical comedy.
• Jazzy original soundtrack: A period-appropriate score that stays out of the way until it’s time to punctuate a gag.

The Gameplay Loop

The rhythm here is the genre’s own: explore a room, pick up anything that isn’t nailed down, talk to everyone twice, and combine inventory items until a locked door isn’t locked anymore. Loco Motive doesn’t reinvent this loop. It refines it.

The core cycle is observe, collect, interrogate, combine. What separates a good adventure game from a tedious one is puzzle legibility—whether the solution feels clever in hindsight or arbitrary in the moment. For most of its runtime, Loco Motive appears to stay on the right side of that line. The train setting does heavy lifting here. A confined space with a fixed cast means puzzle solutions live within a knowable world; nobody is scouring three continents for a rubber chicken. The claustrophobia is a feature. It keeps the logic grounded.

The three-character structure is where the design earns its keep. Because storylines intersect, information gathered as Herman recontextualizes a problem faced as Diana. It’s a soft form of dramatic irony baked into the mechanics—the player knows things the characters don’t yet, and the puzzles occasionally reward that meta-knowledge. When it clicks, it’s the best kind of adventure-game satisfaction: the sense that the whole machine was built to be understood.

Where the Logic Wobbles

Let’s be honest about the genre’s original sin. Moon logic—puzzle solutions so lateral they border on non-sequitur—is the thing that killed point-and-click adventures the first time. Combine the cat with the rubber band to get the mustache; the drill is familiar. Loco Motive mostly avoids this trap, but not entirely. A handful of puzzles ask for leaps that feel less like deduction and more like reading the designer’s mind. These moments are the exception, not the rule, but they’re there, and they’ll stall momentum when they arrive.

This is precisely where the telephone hint system justifies its existence. Rather than shipping players to a browser to spoil the whole solution, the in-game phone offers escalating, spoiler-conscious nudges—and it does so inside the fiction. It’s not a menu. It’s a phone call, which is itself a period-appropriate bit of business. It’s the single best design decision here. It defangs the genre’s worst failure mode without insulting players who don’t need help. Every adventure game from here on should steal it.

Writing and Pacing

Comedy is the hardest thing to engineer, because timing is a variable the player controls. Loco Motive solves this the way the best adventure games always did—by making the reading funny, not just the solving. Examine a painting, and the description is a joke. Talk to a suspect, and the dialogue tree hides gags in branches that might never get picked. The full voice acting carries all of it; a well-delivered line lands twice as hard as a well-written one.

The mystery itself is the weakest thread. Seasoned armchair detectives will likely see the ending coming well before the credits. But—and this matters—the plot is scaffolding for the comedy, not the other way around. Nobody is here to be outwitted. The draw is laughing at Herman’s delusions of Sherlockian grandeur. Judged as a mystery, it’s competent. Judged as a comedy, it’s very good. Know which one is being bought.

The pixel art is the headline, and it deserves the billing. This isn’t lazy retro cosplay—the low-resolution nostalgia bait that slaps a CRT filter on flat sprites and calls it a day. The character animation is dense and expressive, closer to hand-drawn cartoon acting than to anything the 16-bit era could actually render. It’s the aesthetic memory thinks the 90s looked like, executed with tools the 90s never had.

The Art Deco train interiors give the artists a canvas of brass, velvet, and mahogany, and they use it. Each carriage has a distinct personality, which does double duty as environmental storytelling and as a navigational aid—it’s always clear where the action is. As for performance, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and there’s nothing in the design that should strain the Switch. The jazzy soundtrack is the connective tissue, all brushed drums and lazy piano, atmospheric until a sting punctuates a punchline.

On Nintendo Switch, Loco Motive finds a natural home. Point-and-click adventures were built for lean-back play, and the Switch is the best lean-back machine on the market. This is a docked-couch or handheld-in-bed game, and the design suits both modes.

The critical question for any ported adventure game is the control scheme, because these games were born on a mouse and don’t always survive the transition. Robust Games clearly anticipated this. Direct character movement—steering the protagonist rather than clicking a destination—maps cleanly to the analog stick, and the interaction system appears designed for a controller rather than bolted onto one. There’s no fighting a virtual cursor with a thumbstick, the plague of lesser ports.

In handheld mode, the touchscreen restores the genre’s native point-and-click input, and it’s the more intuitive of the two for pure pointing tasks. Small hotspots are the risk, but the game’s generous interaction zones are built to absorb imprecision. Both modes look workable, and neither seems like a compromise. That’s a higher bar than most genre ports clear.

Loco Motive understands something most retro revivals miss: the goal isn’t to recreate the 90s, it’s to recreate how the 90s felt. It clears that bar, if not by a wide margin. The writing is sharp, the animation is a pleasure, and the telephone hint system is the kind of quietly clever solution that should become standard equipment for the genre.

It’s not flawless. The mystery won’t surprise anyone paying attention, the occasional puzzle demands a leap of faith, and once the credits roll, there’s little reason to board the Reuss Express a second time. But these are the complaints of someone who wanted a very good game to be a perfect one. What Robust Games has delivered is a polished, confident comedy that suggests the point-and-click adventure isn’t a corpse to be paraded around for nostalgia. It’s a genre that can still live. It just needs someone to write the jokes.

Worth boarding the train—if this is the kind of ticket that appeals.