Hey, we made it!

In this final installment of TRAIN WEEK, we will look at some games that end with a train journey.

I’ve always been terrible at survival horror games, but there was a period in high school where one of my friends seemed to be play Resident Evil 2 over and over again for almost a year. I used to stay over at his house most weekends, reading his copies of OPSM while he work on his rankings and unlocked more secret items and outfits, so I feel pretty familiar with the game even though I’ve never even played beyond the police station. At the end of the second scenario the player activates a self-destruct system in the secret underground lab where the zombie virus was developed, and while waiting for the evacuation train to arrive must fend off a giant wibbly wobbly virus-infected mutant whose body is slowly ‘evolving’ into a giant writhing mass of claws, teeth and tentacles.

I expect you’ve worked it out already, but the train here functions as a symbol of ‘transportation’, as with the games that start on trains we looked at on day 2. The difference here is that the train represents a return to normality – a form of ascension, delivering the characters from the hellish pit they have been slowly descending into during the course of the game. In RE2’s case this is given visual emphasis by the use of the tunnel, the train racing towards a distant point of light that represents freedom and sanctuary from the unspeakable horror the characters have been caught up in.

At the last minute, the giant mutant makes a surprise return! Now resembling a giant, bloated face, it crawls its way up through the train cars and threatens to devour everyone on board. The player is locked into a carriage and forced to fight off the advancing wall of teeth and tentacles – another example of the claustrophobia motif we looked at yesterday. It’s similar to the escape scene at the end of Metal Gear Solid, in which Snake and Meryl escape from the Shadow Moses base while being pursued by an enraged boss character.

The difference here – the thing that makes it a quintessential ‘train’ experience – is that MGS puts much greater emphasis on physical barriers. The player must stop at checkpoints and clear a path before they can proceed; the boss attempts to ram the player off the road by slamming his jeep into theirs. RE2 takes a similar idea, but internalises it within the vehicle. There is never any doubt that the train will escape the tunnel before the lab explodes – indeed, the characters resort to stopping the train before it leaves to ensure that the beast is caught in the blast – but the tension surrounds whether the train will be carrying three human survivors to safety, or releasing one horrific mutant out into the wider world.

Half-Life 2: Episode One is the only game in the series so far not to have begun on a train of some kind, but it makes up for it by ending with a boss battle in a train station and the characters escaping from City 17 via rail. Again the train represents a means of deliverance from chaos, but in this case we spend the journey looking back instead of forward. Waves of eldritch energies engulf the city, and the player is encouraged to observe their destruction – note that the layout of the caboose means the player only has a 180 degree field of vision, and the terrain running alongside the tracks funnels the player’s interest towards the interdimensional fireworks show.

The effect is subtle. The player does not feel the same sense of racing towards hope, but a sense of relief as they have already escaped. It is at this point that a Combine Advisor flies past in an escape pod, foreshadowing the events of Half-Life 2: Episode Two – informing the player that this war is not yet over! Of course this scene isn’t viewed looking out sideways through a train window, because – bearing in mind day 4’s discussion on the linear nature of rail travel – the most powerful viewpoints on the train are directly to the front and the rear, moving either toward or away from another subject.

Finally we complete the circuit and end where we began. Half-Life takes the idea of symbolic transportation and makes it flesh – a literal metaphorical journey. The G-Man who made so many fleeting appearances during the prologue now addresses you directly, raising twice as many questions as he answers.

Flying through space in a recreation of the Black Mesa tram, Gordon is presented with one final decision – whether to work for this mysterious man, or return to the alien world of Xen and die fighting an endless battle. It captures the idea of the metaphorical journey perfectly! The player indicates their choice by either stepping off the train – a symbolic act of completing the journey, returning to normality, concluding the story – or remaining on the train and refusing to accept the G-Man’s offer – trapping Gordon in narrative limbo, never to return home, doomed to a pointless death, lost on an alien world.

Trains serve as both entry and exit points for these strange other worlds; they guide you through the unknown with the conviction of a steel rail; they are mobile panic rooms, secure but isolated from the outside world; they are an apex of public engineering; they are speed; they are distance; they are certainty. Trains serve many purposes within games, and I hope these articles have helped to stimulate your own thoughts on their use.

The games cited during TRAIN WEEK are far from an exhaustive selection. I’ve concentrated on games that I’m intimately familiar with – with the exception of The Last Express, I think I’ve completed every game used as an example over the course of the week (or watched friends do it, in the case of Resident Evil 2!) – and obviously stringing them together in nice thematic groups to establish a narrative flow may have introduced some argumental bias. I don’t think it’s possible to write a truly complete analysis of anything, but I think I’ve covered everything I had on my mind at the start of the week!

For a more technical perspective on Trains In Games, you could do far worse than checking out the heroic trainsingames.com.

For more examples of Trains In Games, see also Final Fantasy VIII, Unreal Tournament, Metal Slug 2, Action Half-Life, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Minecraft, Mario Party 8, Virtua Fighter 3, Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, Railroad Tycoon, Sunset Riders, Gears of War, Confidential Mission, Professor Layton, Wild Wild Train, Revenge of Shinobi, and Super Locomotive to name but a few!

TRAIN WEEK is over. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

 

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