The best way I can describe Nostalgic Train is it's like the Japanese version of Eveybody's Gone to the Rapture only with the courtesy of a functional run button and decent pacing. It's a walking simulator set in a fictional small Japanese rural town called Natsugiri (summer fog). I understand it's based on real types of villages such as Ohara. It's a lovely location clearly trying to evocate the feelings of nostalgia for a general feeling of the Japanese summer time.
The story mode has you walk from location to location to find these glowing orbs you can reveal pressing R2 to try and find a link to people you know to return you back to the real world. Your nameless character has awoken alone in this village to nothing but the sound of cicadas. Each glowing orb is a little section of text telling stories about characters you can see from this village in another universe and time. There are no other characters, animations or art other than the tiny village location with maybe 10 buildings, 1 train and some text. Yet despite that I found myself surprisingly engrossed in the little story sections and the way they all came together cohesively at the end. The story is poignant yet engrossing and I thought it was surprisingly well written but the thing is it needed to be because there is very little else actually here, this is a completely static world. Your milage for how much you enjoy this game will entirely be down to how much you like the story and how it's presented.
There is a free mode in which you can explore the village to find information notes about the fictional location of Natsugiri or some actual information about the Shōwa period of Japan but you can literally explore the entire environment in probably less than 10 minutes, and I'm probably being generous. I got the platinum trophy in a couple of hours with very minimal effort slowly reading and looking around.
All in all this is a hard game to recommend despite enjoying my time with it. If you like walking simulators, visual novels and melancholic stories though, this may be for you? I'm glad I took a chance with it though as it certainly was a little bit different.
The story mode has you walk from location to location to find these glowing orbs you can reveal pressing R2 to try and find a link to people you know to return you back to the real world. Your nameless character has awoken alone in this village to nothing but the sound of cicadas. Each glowing orb is a little section of text telling stories about characters you can see from this village in another universe and time. There are no other characters, animations or art other than the tiny village location with maybe 10 buildings, 1 train and some text. Yet despite that I found myself surprisingly engrossed in the little story sections and the way they all came together cohesively at the end. The story is poignant yet engrossing and I thought it was surprisingly well written but the thing is it needed to be because there is very little else actually here, this is a completely static world. Your milage for how much you enjoy this game will entirely be down to how much you like the story and how it's presented.
There is a free mode in which you can explore the village to find information notes about the fictional location of Natsugiri or some actual information about the Shōwa period of Japan but you can literally explore the entire environment in probably less than 10 minutes, and I'm probably being generous. I got the platinum trophy in a couple of hours with very minimal effort slowly reading and looking around.
All in all this is a hard game to recommend despite enjoying my time with it. If you like walking simulators, visual novels and melancholic stories though, this may be for you? I'm glad I took a chance with it though as it certainly was a little bit different.