Station to Station Review (dGhost)
A cute, charming, and engaging puzzle-lite game with a beautifully polished voxel atmosphere.
At a fundamental level, you want to chain together as many resources through a pipeline (eg: wheat -> flour mill -> bread bakery -> city) to deliver what is needed in one big hit by placing stations at buildings and joining them via rails. Though the order you ideally would want to chain resources together is fundamentally quite simple, every level mixes it up in multiple ways, some of which I'll explain.
You manage rail and station cost via an economy. Buildings may be too far or the terrain too unsuitable to join things the same way each time due to cost. Buildings also appear through a level as you earn income - do you chain all the resources you currently can to maximise profit now, or save some for a bigger subsequent chain? Cards granting extra one-off bonuses are also unlocked similarly to buildings, and can be planned for and juggled to maximise profit and minimise costs in different ways.
At a base level completing the majority of levels isn't overly difficult. Every level, however, has two challenge conditions on top of the base win condition which incentivise planning and different approaches. One always revolves around minimum amount of leftover profit while the other can be anything from petting ambient animals, not building any bridges, or using up all your cards in a round.
On top of all this, there is so much polish and attention to detail. You can slow down your gameplay, zoom in and enjoy the atmosphere. As production ramps up buildings churn to life, farms grow, cities sprawl. Trains toot and chug along, they come to a stop with a hiss at crossings to let other trains pass before starting up again. The environment as a whole is just adorable.
As of this review there are 32 official levels, and it took me 14 hours to complete all of them + challenges. I can see it being completed fully in 10 but for less experienced people or those who want slow down over 20 hours is definitely reasonable. I recall the devs said playtests had many people taking around 30 hours. YMMV.
For a polished, pretty game with puzzles that are engaging without being taxingly difficult this game is absolutely worth looking at. Take it slow (or don't!), enjoy the aesthetic and ambience, and become the voxel train coordinator you were destined to be.