Tactile, nostalgic, artisanal: Why Tren could be the most charming PlayStation Plus game of 2023
“Everyone’s view on nostalgia is different,” says John Beech, creative director at Media Molecule. “We’ve all had different childhoods, some people are older than me, some are younger… so with Tren, we were trying to evoke that feeling of nostalgia. Let you remember what your childhood was like, rather than tell you what it was like.”
As you guide your little toy train around the tracks and begin to solve physics-based obstacles and tricky logic puzzles, you’ll begin to see elements of a life well-lived. Maybe it’s the old-school TTRPG manuals placed just-so between the tracks. Maybe it’s the old PlayStation 1 you can see off to the side. Maybe it’s the record player, riffing its own impressively on-point Kraftwerk knock-off, soundtracking your little train’s adventures. Whatever it is – and whatever era of gamer you are – Tren has this wily way of appealing to your inner child. And so much of that is because of how much it makes you play.
“Have you seen Ratatouille?” Beech asks me as we talk about nostalgia. “There’s that point where Anton Ego eats the ratatouille and there’s that camera dolly zoom and he’s immediately taken back to being a kid… that’s what we were aiming for with Tren.”