Railwake — Watch the world go by. Hopefully also the zombies.

Railwake is an idle game with a train in it. You kit the train out at the station, pick a line off the ladder and press Depart — and that's the last decision you get to make for a while. It rides on its own: salt flats, then the snowline, then a bore where you lose sight of it completely and there's nothing but the headlight. It shoots whatever climbs on. Sooner or later the run ends, at the end of the line or under a pile of bodies, and you get paid either way.

Gold you spend now. Scraps you keep.

What is in it

There's an actual world

Fourteen biomes grown out of a seed, with the line cut through them. Climbs, bridges, and long bores where the sky just stops and the headlight's the only thing left. There are fourteen wonders out there. You won't see them all in one run.

The ladder goes to 100

Every rung is a line of its own. The first five are hand-laid; the rest get generated longer and meaner as you climb. Going back to farm the rung below the one that killed you isn't cheating, it's the loop.

Two shops

Gold turns up mid-run and you spend it from the dock without stopping the train — it's gone when the run is. Scraps only arrive once the run's over, and they're what buys the things that stay bought.

Bosses pay in gems

Every tenth rung is a boss — and a step up. The first one runs you down and kicks the train forward, a quarter of your health a time, then comes again. Gems buy a Core, and a Core drops into a weapon type and changes what that weapon actually does — fire sets them alight and they run, ice slows them until they stop, void shreds the armour off whatever you're shooting.

Seven special attacks

One for every boss you put down. You take two into a run, and you can change which two whenever you like.

They get on the train

They don't queue up politely at the front. Crawlers climb onto the roof and the walls; everything else grabs a carriage and gets dragged, and then something grabs them — chains of the dead trailing behind you, slowing you down. Draggers fly behind on their ropes until a tree takes them out. Hit a bend fast enough and the lot of them get flung off. Crawl, and you're carrying passengers.

The line

The train crossing a bridge over blue water between desert dunes — desert · a bridge over the strait

The train on a line through dense woodland at dusk — woodland · dusk

What this is, honestly

A free thing in a browser. No account, no download, and it saves where you're sitting. One person has really played this and that person also wrote it, so the sample size is one — which is why it's out here at all. If you get a run in, the single most useful thing you can tell me is the exact moment you got bored.

PLAY THE ALPHA WIKI

New to Railwake? Read the player wiki for how a run works.