All Aboard! The Mysterious Dark Train

For my sins, I've ridden the last train more times than I care to remember, finding spots between drunks about to kick off and drunks about to spew up and pretending to sleep. I've ridden the ghost train, petulantly ignoring the prancing employee in the glowing skeleton suit because I thought it made me cool and not just rude. I've certainly rocked out to Nite Train. I know trains, I'm saying. But what even is Dark Train? An unknown oddity you might fancy puzzling over in this here trailer:

Interesting, isn't it? Baffling, isn't it? Here, this description from developers Paperash might help clear things up:

Dark train is at the core an story-driven skillbased game that offers a unique way of sensing the environment in which it takes place. The player is the main driver of the train, which gives it complete control over the machine. This is, however, by far, no ordinary train. Trainset outweigh within individual wagons detailed models of heterogeneous environments with atmospheric events. Everything works correctly only if the machine has enough energy and attention. Then, begins inside the model, life of its own, which hides a variety of tasks and secrets. The most difficult task is to run the train successfully to the finish.

Ah.

Supposedly the train's a model of the human world, and its inventor died on the day it was finished. We're getting a little allegorical, aren't we? Here, this blog post explains a little of what we're seeing in the trailer, and this video shows the world changing as we fiddle with the forest carriage. I like unfamiliar games which work in unfamiliar ways.

Paperash plan to release Dark Train some time in 2015.