“The Grey, Misty Gloom Streaking Past Me Is Authentically British”

Recreating the tedium of the railway experience in TRAIN SIMWORLD: GREAT WESTERN EXPRESS

I’ve taken the train from Bath to London hundreds of times in my life, usually to visit game developers in the capital. And while I enjoy that part of the job, the journey itself is a dispiriting chore. Rail travel in the United Kingdom is a chaos of delays, overcrowding and overpriced sandwiches. Yet when I saw great western express on Steam—an expansion for Train sim world that recreates part of that route—I felt compelled to play it. Videogames are a powerful form of escapism for me, but what if I played one to achieve the complete opposite of that?