Railsnare

RNG Dev

In-app purchases

About this game

Your train never stops. The only decision you make is which switch to take.

You are in a railway yard seen from above, at night. Your train drives itself, always forward, and the trains sharing the yard with you run the other way. Energise every metre of track before one of them meets you head-on.

Swipe toward the middle of the yard and the next switch takes you to the inner ring; away from it, to the outer one. The rings are concentric, so the gesture follows what you see instead of an up-and-down convention. Hold your finger still and the train speeds up. There is no button, and you never fail by a fraction of a second: the switch stays armed waiting for the junction, and the chosen junction blinks on screen. What should hurt is the choice, not the reflex.

Speeding up is the rope you hang yourself with. It clears the level faster, but it closes the siding — the stretch of parallel track where two trains pass each other without crashing, the only place in the yard where a head-on meeting does not kill. No train enters a passing loop at full speed: arrive running and you stay on the main line. Run fast or keep the shelter: that is the decision you make all the time.

And no enemy moves onto your track without leaving you a way out. To switch lines near you, it needs a switch you can reach before the meeting. The game is hard, not unfair.

THREE THREATS, THREE BEHAVIOURS

Mirror moves onto the track you are on and comes head-on. Shortcut chases nobody: it takes the nearest switch and shows up on a track that was clear two seconds ago. Warden camps on the track you still need to energise, is slow, and that is exactly why it is still there when you finally have to go.

None of the three rolls dice. They always do the same thing in the same situation, and that is what turns "died again" into "I knew it would cut across there".

WHAT CHANGES EACH LEVEL

The yard grows from three rings to five, the shape shifts between sharp-cornered rectangle, rounded rectangle and racing oval, the number of switches varies, and the mix of enemy trains rotates. Layouts are generated, but from a fixed seed: level 7 is always the same level 7 on anyone's device, so you can learn a yard by its silhouette.

Every so often comes the classic yard: every switch aligned at the same points of the lap, forming straight corridors from the outer ring to the inner one. That one has no siding — it is the bare yard.

In the settings you choose the locomotive: electric, or steam, slower and smoking — and the whole yard moves at her pace. Not an easy mode nor a hard one: the same game with more time to read the screen, and a longer level.

Your speed never changes. What speeds up is the world around you.

NO CATCH

No ads. No energy to wait for. Nothing locked behind a purchase: the game is complete, and the only purchase is a tip that unlocks nothing at all. Works offline, asks for no account and requests no permissions.

Six languages. Portrait, played one-handed.

RNG Desenvolvimento · [e-mail]

What’s new

The app version is shown on screen, which was missing whenever you needed to say which build you have. The privacy policy now opens straight from the app, instead of being an address nobody can copy.