There aren’t many games lately which have compelled me to do a tweet, or skeet, or whatever you prefer to call ejaculating one’s thoughts out onto the socials. The Trolley Solution’s Steam Next Fest demo not only did that, it convinced me to post a tweet I didn’t even write.
It’s a game from indie dev byDanDans that starts off as a series of moral quandaries, each inspired by philosopher Philippa Foot’s famous and now also thoroughly memed-to-death Trolley Problem. That being a thought experiment which forces you examine the ethics of either letting nature take its course to deliver one outcome that could cause harm to others, or actively intervening to cause another that might do the same in a different fashion. I didn’t go in expecting to become enraptured in what I can only describe as a tragic rail romance.
At first, things were as I’d anticipated. Upon firing the game up, you’re transported to a main menu that fittingly sees you move a tram along some tracks to different stations, each of which takes you to a minigame offering some fresh twist on the classic Trolley Problem.
Sometimes you’re choosing whether to let five people tied to one track die, or flick a lever that’ll doom a person on another track instead. In one case, your girlfriend and best friend are on the two tracks, having cheated together without the friend knowing it was your partner they were engaging in hanky-panky with. Also, the friend has a terminal disease and will die in a month anyway.
You know, the standard stuff very smart people think about while washing their pits in the shower. One makes you choose between virtual people dying, and the game asking for permission to post a very controversial tweet via your very real Twitter account, assuming you’ve not abandoned the Musk platform because using carrier pigeons is far superior.
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Then, not long after a game based around picking which track didn’t have a cat hiding under the giant plastic cup perched on it, I pulled into a station dubbed “Mai tomori sama romansu”. It soon became apparent this was not your standard tram stop.
I found myself flung headlong into a visual novel-style story about a schoolgirl named Tameko, her best mate Tomadochi, and their mortal enemy, a superficial and popular former friend named Teki. Added to this triple T triangle is a Trolley, because this still is The Trolley Solution, lest you forget. I’ll not spoil what happens in this short multiple-choice and marvellously meta mirage amid the funny puzzling, save for one thing.
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.
So, if you find yourself at the Steam Next Fest intersection and aren’t sure which direction to pull the big games lever, I can thoroughly recommend yanking it The Trolley Solution’s way. Especially since the full thing’s set to come out in Q4 2025.