| RailGods of Hysterra | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
RailGods of Hysterra is a survival crafting RPG based on the Cthulhu mythos, where you travel the waking world with your own RailGod. Read our review of its early-access build to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
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Everything We Know About RailGods of Hysterra
RailGods of Hysterra Story Plot
The story of RailGods of Hysterra follows the player as a Dreamer, tasked with venturing into the Dreamlands to undo the catastrophic effects of the Old Ones' arrival on Earth. With little more than their wits, scavenged resources, and an unfathomable eldritch machine at their command, they must navigate this strange and hostile realm.
RailGods of Hysterra Gameplay
RailGods of Hysterra is a multiplayer survival horror game built around three core mechanics: resource gathering, combat, and RailGod upkeep. Players take on the role of Dreamers, individuals venturing into the Dreamlands in search of a way to undo the devastation caused by the arrival of the Old Ones. To accomplish this, they must guide the RailGod—an unsettling fusion of steam engine and Shoggoth—toward its final destination.
The game is presented in a top-down isometric perspective, with players exploring different regions of the Dreamlands to collect essential resources such as wood, stone, leather, and food. These materials serve multiple purposes, including restoring health, satisfying hunger and thirst, crafting items, and constructing new components for the RailGod.
Combat unfolds in real time, requiring players to balance attacks, dodges, and abilities within a set range. The mechanics share similarities with titles like Diablo and Nobody Wants to Die, while also incorporating certain elements reminiscent of Dark Souls, albeit in a less direct manner.
Maintaining the RailGod is a critical aspect of survival, demanding regular upkeep and expansion. Players must feed it human flesh, repair its parts, and continuously enhance its design using the materials they gather. Its sustenance is vital; should it stop moving before reaching the heart of the Dreamlands, the journey will end with the players left stranded.
RailGods of Hysterra Release Date
Unleashed to Steam Early Access on May 7, 2025
RailGods of Hysterra was released for the PC (Steam) on May 7, 2025, at 1:00 p.m. EDT/10:00 a.m. PDT, following a delayed initial release set for April 23, 2025. Check out the table below to see what time the game comes out in your area!
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| Price | $19.99 | ||||||
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RailGods of Hysterra Review [Early Access]
Dream A Better Dream Than This
I really do love it when game devs decide to dip their toes into the twisted waters of H.P. Lovecraft’s work. Say what you will about the man’s personal life—or his infamous cat-naming skills—but you can’t deny that his writing birthed an entire genre, much like Tolkien laid the groundwork for the high fantasy we know today.
Cosmic Horror is such a rich canvas for letting your imagination spiral into the esoteric and the arcane… which is exactly why it stings to see a game like this come up with something as wonderfully bizarre as a RailGod—an amalgam of unknowable flesh and indestructible steel—only to execute it in the plainest way possible. And in a genre packed with incredible titles like The Sinking City, Darkest Dungeon 2, Sunless Sea, and even Fallen London (if you’re willing to stretch the definition of a game), being forgettable is honestly worse than being bad.
I wish I could say there was a lot to unpack in RailGods of Hysterra, but that would be a bare-tentacle-faced lie. Still, let’s dive right in and hope we remain human by the end.
Exploring The Waking World With Your Own RailGod
RailGods of Hysterra is a survival crafting game that sees you trekking across the Waking World, hopping from one patch of uncorrupted land to the next in search of answers—and maybe a shot at salvaging what’s left after the Old Ones showed up and redecorated reality with flesh and madness. Your overall goal is to reach the heart of the corruption, uncover whatever eldritch nonsense is fueling it, and try not to get devoured in the process. To do that, you’ll have to scavenge ruins in safe zones, fight off horrors you encounter, and slowly cobble together your means of travel—because Cthulhu knows you’re not making that journey on foot.
This is where the game’s most unique (though admittedly low-bar-clearing) feature comes in: the RailGod. Imagine a Shoggoth fused with a steam engine, forged in the Dreamlands and manifested into the Waking World by your own hands. Yes, it’s a train Cthulhu. And you’re the conductor. It’s grotesque, it’s magnificent, and more importantly, it’s your only ticket forward—both narratively and mechanically, because resources are limited in each safe zone, and you’ll need to move on regularly to survive.
The RailGod also doubles as your base of operations. Each of its cars can be built up and expanded with a simple grid-based system, giving you space to craft workstations, store supplies, or even cage the horrors you manage to capture. Each car has its own buildable grid, with separate layouts for walls, roofs, and doorways, giving you just enough flexibility to be creative without becoming overwhelmed. Being able to take your base with you almost everywhere certainly encourages you to upkeep the RailGod because having a bare one would certainly make your excursions on the outside much more difficult.
Speaking of, let’s talk about the other half of the RailGods of Hysterra experience: your expeditions into each uncorrupted zone, which is basically your only means of gathering resources. First off, getting there is half the fun. Progression in RailGods is completely linear—you’re on train tracks, after all—so reaching a new patch of land is as simple as activating your RailGod and letting it chug along at one of three speeds toward your next destination, which is helpfully displayed at the top of your screen. You’re free to craft, organize, or just putter around your train until you arrive.
Once there, you disembark and begin your expedition. Each zone offers a mix of essential materials—wood, stone, seeds, and monster parts—needed for building, cooking, or crafting upgrades. Occasionally you’ll stumble across bits of lore that hint at what happened after the Old Ones arrived, but most of your time is spent doing what survival crafters ask of you: gather, haul, repeat.
Of course, it’s not all black stars and yellow skies out there. You’ve got a few things to manage if you want to make it back in one piece. First up is health—straightforward enough. Keep it topped up with bandages and don’t get killed by monsters. Easy. Then there’s Satiety—basically hunger, if your vocabulary isn’t pulled from a Victorian fever dream. Eat food to maintain it, or watch your health bar get chopped in half as you starve. Cooked food’s better, obviously, but harder to come by while you’re out in the field, usually needing to be prepped back on your RailGod.
The last stat to track is Madness. Just stepping outside starts ticking it up. You can reduce it with consumables, but letting it build is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, any Madness you bring back can be converted into skill points to upgrade your Dreamer (that’s you). On the other hand, the more madness you accumulate, the weirder things become. Your inventory may vanish mid-exploration as hallucinations kick in, and certain horrors start lurking at the edges of your vision. Keep your balance, and you’ll be fine. Probably.
When you return to your RailGod, you’ve got new materials, new threats behind you, and the next destination ahead. It’s a simple loop, and to be clear, I don’t dislike it. The structure isn’t overcomplicated, and the feedback loop should, in theory, be satisfying. But unfortunately, a few rough edges in the execution keep it from ever crossing into actual fun.
Crafting and Base-building Were Almost Great
The first thing holding RailGods of Hysterra back from being genuinely fun is its lackluster variety—both in resources and destinations. Starting with resources: it was a bit of a letdown to realize there are only three tiers of items and upgrades, and the differences between them aren’t all that meaningful beyond some stat bumps. For a game that leans so heavily into survival and crafting, I expected a little more depth.
What’s worse, these resources don’t mesh well with the research system. In theory, researching materials to unlock new blueprints should feel rewarding. In practice, you’ll burn through most of the meaningful discoveries within the first half hour—stone, sticks, rags, grass, iron—and after that, new research becomes increasingly sparse and disappointing. By the second tier, there’s barely anything left to uncover.
To the game’s credit, crafting stations are one of the smoother systems. They work automatically once you queue something up, letting you focus on other tasks. Even better, they pull from all inventories across your RailGod, so you’re not stuck hauling ingredients from one car to another—a genuinely welcome quality-of-life feature. Crafting is also nicely segmented by tier, with clear recipe previews, output quantities, resource costs, and time estimates. If it weren’t for the shallow pool of materials, crafting could’ve been one of the game’s strongest mechanics.
Then there’s the base-building, which somehow manages to be both overly complicated and creatively stifling. You can build walls and roofs—split into three types: corners, basics, and doorways—each with their own resource costs and grid-specific placement rules. I get why there’s a distinction (a train car isn’t exactly your standard base layout), but when you’re limited to a 4x3 buildable grid and each piece can only go in a specific slot, the freedom to “build creatively” kind of disappears. Why not just use smart auto-snapping walls and roofs that change based on placement? It’d make a lot more sense for such a confined space.
That same grid applies to your crafting stations, too, though fortunately, they’re less restrictive—you can plop them anywhere on the grid. The game also claims to reward you for carefully planning your base by offering bonuses if similar stations are housed together in the same enclosed train car, like faster crafting or cheaper recipes. In theory, that’s a cool mechanic. In practice, I didn’t feel a meaningful difference. Either the bonuses are too minor, or the game doesn’t communicate them clearly enough to matter.
Expeditions Aren’t Any Better…In Fact, They’re Worse
Moving on to the game’s variety of destinations—technically it has some, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe the difference between them beyond their centerpieces. Outside of whatever unique feature the destination preview promises, you’re still trudging through the same sandy beaches, dead forests, and stony hills in every zone.
Sure, the place labeled “Warehouse” had, in fact, a rundown warehouse in the middle. The one called “Lighthouse” had—you guessed it—a lighthouse. These landmarks give each destination a superficial sense of identity, but they rarely justify their own existence. The warehouse offered almost nothing in the way of unique resources, and the lighthouse had literally nothing of value. Other areas may introduce tougher enemies, but that’s about it.
New resources trickle in at a frustratingly slow pace, and when they do show up, it’s usually as random drops from enemies rather than something you find while exploring. And as I mentioned earlier, half of these can’t even be researched, so good luck figuring out what any of it is for.
Exploration, in a game that should be driven by discovery and cosmic dread, feels unrewarding at best and downright pointless at worst. The game would also benefit from some QoL upgrades, like notifying you what recipes you’ve unlocked from studying or building new crafting stations, because I genuinely was stuck dying in a loop because I didn’t know I could already make new armor and weapons. Perhaps some new, unique places to go to so progression is more noticeable, and some better enemies outside of “different kind of guy to hit you from up close or far away”.
Don’t even get me started on the combat—it’s basically just poking things with a stick or shooting them with a gun. Technically, you have skills, but they unlock so slowly you’ll forget they exist, and when they do show up, they’re either too weak to matter or too situational to bother with. At this point, it’s just a raw stat race. There’s no incentive to experiment with different weapons, not that the game gives you many to begin with.
Some Credit For Its Visuals and Audio
Moving on to the few things the game actually gets right—its visuals are more than acceptable, both in cutscenes and 3D assets. The craftable train car parts look solid, and the RailGod itself is genuinely impressive. Some of the set pieces shine too, provided you can overlook the game’s overall lack of environmental variety.
The music is passable—suitable as background ambiance—but I would’ve appreciated something more esoteric instead of the default “vaguely dark and dramatic” vibe. Not a huge complaint, though; it gets the job done. Same goes for the voiceovers in the game’s sparse cutscenes. There’s definitely room for improvement on both fronts, but when it comes to sights and sounds, RailGods of Hysterra is performing fathoms better than the rest of the game.
The Early Access Syndrome Is Palpable
It’s clear we’re way too early in RailGods of Hysterra’s development cycle to enjoy much of anything. I get that it’s early access, but there is such a thing as too early. Right now, the game lacks substance—there’s nothing anchoring the fun, and far too few moving parts to create any meaningful synergy between systems, save for a select few. This is early access syndrome at its worst. At least when a game is bad, it has a clear direction for improvement. This one? I’m not so sure. Maybe a few solid content updates could steer it back on track, but that remains to be seen.
It’s a shame, really. I want to believe this game can be salvaged, but for now, RailGods of Hysterra isn’t the dreamwalk I hoped for. It’s more like the kind of dream you get during a power nap—disjointed, forgettable, and gone the moment you blink. You’re better off dreaming of something better, something deeper, for the time being. Or you could just wake up and play something else.
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RailGods of Hysterra Product Information
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| Title | RAILGODS OF HYSTERRA |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 7, 2025 (PC) |
| Developer | Troglobytes Games |
| Publisher | Digital Vortex Entertainment |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Survival, Multiplayer, Horror, Action |
| Number of Players | 1-5 (Online Co-Op Multiplayer) |
| Rating | PEGI 16 |
| Official Website | RailGods of Hysterra Website |
