it's sunless sea but with trains and a dodge mechanic. autism paradise.

It's worth playing for the writing alone: its hilariously satirical with an absurdist bent. Imagine if Douglas Adams wrote a book about Victorian Era space trains.

That said, I have two critiques. The first is the gameplay. The majority of your playtime will be spent watching your engine travel (SLOWLY, even with the best engines) from point A to point B, mostly retracing routes you've traveled many times before. Occasionally this will be interrupted by an enemy you need to fight, but the combat mechanics just aren't that entertaining. Partly, this is because the game encourages you to grind/farm make-work quests (deliver X good to Y port!). Even for the quests that aren't procedurally generated, you'll be revisiting the same cities over and over because you keep getting new quests that link back to them. There are a handful of quests that can be completed entirely within a single port, but even those force you to retread the same circuits because they have time gates ("you must come back in two weeks to continue this quest..." sometimes a dozen times or more). That leads to a high percentage of low-entertainment play time, even if there are some real gems in there.

The other problem is that the game really gives you very little agency, for a role-playing game. You make tons of choices, certainly, many of which even have at least the appearance of significant moral valence. But at the end of the day, very little of what your captain does makes a meaningful difference. You might favor this faction or that faction, but neither of them have a defined, relatable philosophy to make your choice anything but arbitrary and regardless of which you choose they'll either end up in a permanent stalemate (e.g. tacketies vs stove pipes) or else victory by one side or the other changes nothing on the ground (e.g. Psalmists vs Widows at the Wellmouth). Time and again, your character is faced with systemic injustice, and has the same three options: 1) Get on the bandwagon and grind others beneath their feet; 2) push again and again for incremental changes that make no difference whatever in the actual problem; or 3) start violent revolutions that only make matters worse. You can't fix anything. You can't save anyone. All you can do is wallow in suffering as the world decays toward its inevitable death. For a novel, that would be a reasonable artistic choice. You could use that philosophy/setting to explore all sorts of fascinating things about the human condition. But for an RPG, categorically denying the possibility of real agency produces a deeply unsatisfying experience.

serious issues trying to run the game