I wake up, head pounding. A curt voice echoes through the room: “With immediate effect, free movement on the train is forbidden. We’ve been spotted again.” I stand up and gather my bearings. I’m on a train, there’s a very ominous red glow permeating through the room, and the window is obscured by a mass of slithering tentacles, so close that I can make out each individual sucker as they writhe.
This isn’t one of my recurring nightmares, though. I’m actually at Gamescom 2026 playing Dreadline Express, the debut game from solo developer David Konecny. One of the first things I say to him is that, as no doubt many others also did, it reminds me of Snowpiercer, which was one of the first pieces of fiction to popularize the concept of all of humanity inhabiting a singular train traversing Earth.
Much to my surprise, Konecny tells me that when he started development, he’d actually never heard of Snowpiercer, but he cannot deny the similarities the two have. But where the Bong Joon Ho-directed masterpiece (and Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, the original graphic novel before Snowpiercer) was set during an ice age, the world in Dreadline Express appears to have been taken over by some Lovecraft-esque terrors.
Having played Saros earlier this year, one of the inspirations for that setting was The King in Yellow, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft short stories from 1895. In Saros, your crew slowly descends into madness, and when you eventually leave your room in Dreadline Express, you’ll meet a few of the other passengers, who appear to be succumbing to the same thing.
Combined with the PSX-era aesthetic choice, Dreadline’s atmosphere is spectacular. It’s a psychological horror, which means you’re not going to be jumping out of your seat, but you’ll be drawn in by just how unsettling the experience is aboard the last human train. But it isn’t just straight track with a one-shot story to consume; cards represent clues and knowledge you discover, and as you interact with the world, more options open up to you.
Konecny explained to me that most “puzzles” have multiple solutions. For example, a young man is rocking back and forth with his hands over his ears in the corner of the train corridor. He’s being driven to the brink of insanity by the “unbearable noise” of the “infernal machine.” Earlier, I’d discovered that I am an apothecary, thanks to sussing out the combination lock on a case in my carriage.
Therefore, with a card obtained by speaking to the man, whose name I now know is Euler, I headed back to the case and collected some laudanum. This can be used to ease Euler’s pain and gather more information from him. However, Konecny explained to me when I found it that the laudanum has multiple purposes, and solving Euler’s conundrum has more than one solution. As a result, there’s a degree of replayability here, and two people can find vastly different routes to the end.
My time with Dreadline Express came to a close after I had to make a big decision, one that Konecny told me has huge implications for the rest of the game: Which passenger do I sacrifice to the supreme engineer? Before I’m allowed to make my choice, though, I must find out as much as I can about the four individuals in the two rooms available to me by using the cards I’ve accumulated to probe and persist in dialogue. I’d been in the shoes of the protagonist, Samuel Mather, for no more than 20 minutes, but this decision already felt like a huge weight on my shoulders.
I’m dying to learn more about Dreadline Express. I want to know what’s going on, why the last human train is being attacked by grotesque aliens, who the other passengers are, and what the various mysteries within hold. This has the chance to be a severely underrated indie gem.
Dreadline Express will be coming to Windows PC later this year.