The Halloween season can be a bit of a challenge for gamers who want the vibes of the season minus the gore. If you try to find recommendations for spooky games fit for October, you’ll likely come across list after list of terrifying horror games with slasher levels of violence. That’s not exactly helpful if you’re looking for something a little more family-friendly. Sometimes you just want cute vampires who aren’t trying to suck your blood.
For the Halloweenies out there, Spooky Express has pulled into the station at just the right moment. Available now on Windows PC and mobile, the delightful new puzzle game is a perfect fit for the season with its cute ghouls and goblins. It’s a great pick for kids who aren’t quite ready to step into Raccoon City, and older genre fans will die for its brain-busting puzzles too.
Developed by Draknek & Friends, a puzzle publisher that has made a name for itself in the genre over the last decade, Spooky Express is all about the horrors of public transportation. Your job is to get monsters to their destination by laying down tracks to create a train route in each level, similar to 2022’s excellent Railbound. It’s a tactile gameplay hook that’s especially well suited to mobile, where I can drag my finger to lay down tracks on its bite-sized, grid-based levels.
The goal is simple enough, but each of your passengers is… well, let’s say, particular. Zombies need to be delivered to their graves, while vampires need to be dropped off at coffins. Demons and vampires can’t coexist, as the former will incinerate the latter if they come in close contact. Further complicating matters is that sometimes you’ll need to pick up a human along the way, but monsters don’t play nice with them. Humans can get scared off your train when passing by a monster, or even worse, turned into a zombie. A successful route needs to account for all of this, making sure each monster gets to its home while humans get to the track endpoint safely.
The challenge, and joy, of Spooky Express comes from figuring out all of these clever interactions through experimentation. It’s a game full of silly discoveries that goes far deeper than you’d expect. I eventually learn that I need to intentionally turn some humans into monsters in order to make sure every coffin or grave on the board has an inhabitant. Scaring vampires using demons becomes an imperative strategy when I need to juggle monsters on and off my train to move them around the grid. Each level is a tough order of operations challenge that requires me to draw twisted routes that snake around the grid.
While it’s all dressed up with cheery visuals suitable for kids, Spooky Express delivers some seriously tough puzzles that will still stump seasoned genre veterans. That’s par for the course for Draknek & Friends, which has built its reputation on publishing brainy games that are easy to learn, but hard to master. (Don’t sleep on last year’s phenomenal LOK Digital.) A hint system that reveals where part of the track should go gives just enough of a nudge to get you in the right direction, without giving away the all-important “aha!” moments that make Spooky Express so compelling.
Even if I’ve had to look up a few solutions in shame, Spooky Express has successfully gotten me into the Halloween spirit. It’s the kind of October charmer that I look for every year, all wrapped up in a devilishly clever puzzle game that’s sitting comfortably next to Is This Seat Taken? on my iPhone screen. Give me a game like this and I’ll eat it up like a trick or treater every time.
Spooky Express is available now on Windows PC. It’s also available on iOS and Android devices, where you can try around 25 levels for free.
