Choo-Choo Charles is coming to get you this year

A train with a clown face and spider legs
(Image credit: Two Star Games)

Sometimes you're scavenging equipment from abandoned camps in the forest and then a train with a clown face and spider legs races toward you. We've all been there. In Choo-Choo Charles, you can fight back, and developer Two Star Games showed a little bit of how that'll unfold in a new gameplay preview shown during the Day of the Devs segment in the Summer Game Fest stream.

This open world horror game is about preparing to 1v1 a monster train. You have your own train, but it doesn't have spider legs. It's a normal train, built to get you around the map so that you can equip it with the right guns and gear to take on Charles. One of those things will be a mounted machine gun.

You have to leave the safety of your train to look for supplies and complete missions from nearby locals. One segment showed an abandoned mine that had some puzzles inside of it. While you're out there though, Charles could show up and tear you apart.

Two Star Games is actually just one developer: Gavin Eisenbeisz. Eisenbeisz was surprised by the response from the game's announcement last year.

"I'll be honest, I was a little surprised by some of the comments," he said. "As a kid, I wasn't particularly scared of [Thomas the Tank Engine]. But looking back at it, I can definitely see where some of that comes from."

That's probably why he put spider legs and a clown face on Charlie. Thanks, Eisenbeisz.

Choo-Choo Charles has a Steam page and is aiming for a release sometime this year.

Associate Editor

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He's done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He's interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.