I’ve discovered my good summer season recreation: A stomach-churning horror story about Czech practice conductors constructed over a bafflingly deep simulation of a fictional subway

I’ve developed a little bit of a status amongst my coworkers for loving area of interest, lo-fi indie video games that make you’re feeling dangerous and gross and bizarre on the within. I’m flattered to face out in such a means, however I additionally do not ever wish to be typecast. Anyway, Brno Transit is a recreation about being trapped underground along with your nasty, weirdly sexual boss and neurotic coworkers as actuality disintegrates round you.

I beloved developer Spytihněv’s earlier recreation, the Soviet boomer shooter Hrot, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting his subsequent mission. Much like fellow FPS designer David Szymanski (Dusk, Iron Lung), Spytihněv zigged somewhat than zagging, following up Hrot with a brief narrative horror recreation somewhat than one other shooter.

You’re a novice practice conductor studying the ropes underneath Brno, the second metropolis of the Czech Republic. It’s “the dampest subway east of anything that matters,” based on Spytihněv, and I believe it helps set the tone out of the gate to know that Brno doesn’t have a subway system in actual life.

What follows is a surreal, scatological (a Spytihněv signature), and homoerotic (that is new!) delve into guys being dudes on the job. For me, it known as to thoughts Szymanski’s Iron Lung (however extra fleshy, sexual, and human) or 2024’s breakout Mouthwashing (but not as character driven, and somehow even less life-affirming). The controversial Horses also sprang to mind, but with less explicitly harrowing subject matter⁠—and more explicit full-frontal nudity, let’s go boys.

Even more than Mouthwashing, which portrays one of the most evil fictional workplaces I’ve ever seen, Brno Transit captured the feeling of starting a job where you matter so little as to want to die, while the apathy and neglect of your coworkers is somehow even worse than if they actively hated you.

This game runs on surprise, so I’ll try to talk around the real zinger moments, but it’s one long sequence of “Go here, do this. Why did you do that? Now you have to fix it. Embarrassing.” If you’ve ever talked to a coworker at a shit job and felt like they were a space alien playing a prank on you with how they think and view the world, Brno Transit will speak to you on some level.

Your first day ends with you eating a tainted hot dog that gives you the runs and the voms, sending you scrambling for a bathroom as gurgles and whines fill your headphones. The doorless, exposed toilet in the employee area is indefinitely occupied when you reach it, while the bathroom in the station above is out of order. I don’t know if there’s another way of finishing this bit, but I had to take the train to another station to find an open commode. I haven’t shared this exact stress dream or level of gastrointestinal distress, but it was still incredibly gnarly and relatable in the moment.

You black out and wake up on a dirty floor mattress in the conductors’ area, with splotches of feces and a trail of brown footprints trailing backwards from your resting place. Out in the depot, an entire train is covered in crap, and the first order of the day is to hose it off, Powerwash Simulator-style. How could this have all been you?

Events only get stranger and grosser from there, and I was hooked. Brno Transit shares a brown, desolate, hopeless world with the preceding Hrot, despite being set closer to the modern day. It’s a new standout of the mundane or on the job horror subgenre. I want these awful subway stations to get love like the Backrooms or Exit 8.

Model trains

Brno Transit is a medley of nastiness punctuated with surreal hilarity, and while much of the humor is front-and-center in the scripted story, one of my favorite moments was emergent: I had to do a double take out of the corner of my eye to notice a passenger randomly hanging off the end of a train as it left the station. The simulated little world of Brno Transit, which exists whether you’re paying attention to it or not, is what really takes it to the next level.

Undergirding the scripted story stuff is a continuous simulation of a small subway system with two lines, one counter- and the other clockwise. It feels like zooming into someone’s model train set, and does a superb job of evoking a much larger world than what’s just in front of you.

A diverse array of NPCs mill about the stations or wander on and off the trains. They have this sense of anonymity and guarded hostility that really nailed the feeling of making eye contact with strangers on the subway⁠. You don’t matter to them, don’t bother them.

This effect, plus the the shifting and jostling of the train cars, the way the lighting changes as you pass through tunnels, as well as Spytihněv’s excellent sound, music, and foley work add up to this uncanny feel of actually riding the subway. I was reminded of how no one’s done nighttime better than Thief or Thief 2, even with their aged graphics. These three games are punching well above their weight in art and atmosphere.

You have to ride the train to start, but you quickly take control of your own engine, carefully adjusting your acceleration to avoid hitting stops too late or too early, doing your best to slot seamlessly into the pre-existing schedule of trains constantly running on this loop. It’s a simplified approximation of a whole-hog train sim like Densha de Go!

A free trip mode unlocks after finishing the story, and I really feel like there’s every kind of weirdness left to find underneath Brno. At one level within the story, I stumbled right into a skull-filled catacomb connected to one of many stations, with unnerving music, a complicated, switchback format, and a bumbling vacationer snapping pictures. I assumed for certain this was a part of the essential path, however it was simply there. What different odd shit is ready for me in any respect the stops I by no means explored on the essential path?

Brno Transit would have been a simple advice for me at $9 if it was simply the standout surreal horror narrative journey, however the truth that it is constructed on high of this little mannequin practice world really units it aside. I like this freaky little recreation, I like a Spytihněv joint, and I am unable to wait to see what he does subsequent.