By the great transport gods, trolleymageddon is upon us! It’s the end of the line as we know it, and I feel fine. All of that is to say that two wacky trolley-related games are releasing within days of each other, no doubt driving fans of the budding genre off the rails or road.
The Trolley Solution, a game about a famous philosophical quandary and also at least one tale of a girl falling deeply in love with a tram, pulled up at this stop on September 12th. Boarding costs £5.20/$6.49/€6.33 right now, or £5.40 if you want the deluxe edition the comes with a mysterious and possibly satirical DLC dubbed ‘the V.I.P. lever’. If you hurry, you can probably still catch it! Troleu, a game that tasks you with checking tickets and occasionally kicking the bottoms of troublemakers as a trolleybus conductor, is due to pull up on the opposite side of the stop later today, September 15th. Make sure you’ve got your ticket ready!
If you opt to get on The Trolley Solution’s tram, which is named Trolley-San, you’re in for a series of amusing scenarios/puzzles based around Phillipa Foot’s famous trolley problem. You know, the one with the unstoppable train speeding towards a point at which some tracks separate, with some unfortunate folks strapped to the rails of both forks, and a lever presenting the chance to save one group at the expense of the other.
As I discovered when I gave its demo a go back in June, The Trolley Solution takes that scenario in a whole bunch of wacky directions, including one which politely requests permission to tweet something highly controversial about footwear from your Twitter account. That’s probably less of a threat if you’re solely on BlueSky or have smartly given up the socials. Also, this happens:
Tameko falls, to a degree of your choosing, in love with a tram. He goes by Trolley-San and keep pulling up and saying “Ding Ding” in what I can only assume by Tameko’s reactions to be an incredibly suave and seductive fashion. This and all the rest of the game – and I can’t emphasise this enough – are a right hoot, a great laugh, and a throaty chuckle.
Given the updated Steam page images feature the likes of a person pushing a tram up an incline like Sisyphus, I can only assume the full version’s even wackier.
Image credit: andrground
Troleu, meanwhile, is a bus conductor sim with attitude. Lest you accuse me of falsifying its trolleyness, the Steam description insists on a couple of occasions that this is a “trolleybus”. I’ve no idea what the difference between the two is, but our Nic liked the demo when he gave it a go back in June. That said, while he enjoyed lobbing folks with fake passes out of the doors “at which point they fly off down the street like a crisp packet in a gale”, he was neutral about the child kicking you can do if you wish. Here’s his conclusion:
To keep you on your toes, there’s both a passenger annoyance meter and your own boss, the ticket inspector, to contend with, who makes sure you haven’t been letting on fare dodgers. I am as yet not fully convinced there is more than 15 minutes of fun here but it is a very good 15 minutes.
Right, now pick your transport and get on. Or, divide yourself in two somehow and board both. Or board neither and stay home to play something else. The choice, as when dealing with tram quandaries and ornery passengers, is yours.