Snowpiercer originally started as a French graphic novel that was eventually translated into several different languages. It then became a successful movie and then a TV show that lasted for four seasons. The setup makes it seem like the story would translate well into video game form, but that has yet to happen. EverRail is essentially a different take on the Snowpiercer idea, and we checked out the title before its release in Steam Early Access.

In the distant future, mankind has decided to colonize the moon Epsilon Inara, an otherwise frozen wasteland. To increase their chance of success, the colonists sent machines to build the bases and railways necessary for survival. The plan worked, but the machines have been infected, and the incoming colonists have been kept in their stasis pods. You play the role of one of the freed colonists on a mission to rescue other colonists and scavenge supplies — all while trying to use a train to survive the endless cold.

EverRail can't be classified under a single genre, since it takes elements from several very different genres and mashes them together into one title. The game takes the core elements from survival games, such as hunger and having to craft everything you need. This not only applies to yourself but also to the train's inhabitants that you acquire throughout your journey. This is in conjunction with scavenging raw materials from the places you visit, since you'll rarely find anything in the field that's completely intact. All of your items have a tendency to break over time, which means you'll be wholly engaged in the crafting loop since there's no permanence to anything you make or acquire. The major difference is that the train is your home base, which means you're always moving and don't have to worry about how you'll make the long trek back home.

The shooting can be done either through first- or third-person perspective, and the shooting feels like a military sim instead of the more relaxed approach usually seen in the sci-fi genre. You have no shields, at least not initially, and you don't have any armor. You also don't have regenerative health. All of those things become more noticeable when you realize that every shot takes off a good chunk of health, and it only takes a few shots before you're outright killed. There is some solace in that you can spend your next life returning to your corpse to recover whatever you'd scavenged, but if you haven't picked up anything in that previous life, you don't have the chance to regain ammo and health for the next person to use.

The game feels like a combination of a looter shooter and an extraction shooter. Every place requires you to survive while getting as much stuff as possible, which includes survivors since they act as reserve lives for each run. Due to the time limit imposed by the stationary train's batteries, you need to get in and out in quickly. The game doesn't have any adversarial components, so you're only going to be stopped by robots, but the chances are high that one bad mission can end everything.

Then there's the actual act of driving the train. You can control the acceleration as well as whether you're activating shields for protection. You can determine which tracks you want to travel on, and you can deploy a glider to scout ahead. One thing you can't do is let the train go on autopilot. If you're taking a turn on a track, you'll need to be the one to go to the control room and slow things down, so you don't derail. You'll also need to be the one to deploy the brakes if you want to stop somewhere and explore an outpost. There's rarely a moment when you can leave the train moving without someone at the controls.

The combination creates an experience that can be best described as tense at all times. There's rarely a moment's rest; you'll have to juggle a ton of things to make some real progress. Things play similarly to Sea of Thieves. If you have a four-man team, things would be tough but manageable, but playing the game solo means that you can't have any breaks at any time. Going solo is still doable, but it's akin to playing the game on the hardest mode.

There are a few things that might irk players in the game's current state. The first has to do with the difficulty tuning. The premise of the game is already challenging from the outset, but the number of enemies you encounter at any outpost seems specifically tuned for a four-player group. Go into an outpost solo, and you'll notice that the number of enemies you encounter and the damage they inflict is the same, making it almost impossible for solo players to survive any encounter unless you start at a lower difficulty level or use a more customized game difficulty experience.

The second has to do with the controls for those who decide to play with a gamepad. While these kinds of games are more viable for keyboard and mouse players, the game does fairly well with a gamepad. However, the game does a poor job of showing the appropriate gamepad controls; it often shows keyboard specific commands instead. There are also button prompts that are missing in certain screens, so it's impossible to do things like move a map around unless you're willing to hit every button to stumble on the correct controls.

The train seems rather empty. You can see every type of fabricator you want, and you can create as many cars as you want to expand the space, but what you won't see is other people. You can see everyone playing with you, but you'll never see the people who you've rescued aboard the train. That makes the space feel rather lifeless, as if the colonists you've rescued are just another resource like scrap metal, and that ends up dehumanizing the whole affair.

Finally, there's the completely manual nature of some basic actions. As mentioned before, nothing concerning the train can be done automatically, but the game also seems to be missing other things that can be considered quality of life features. Pick up an item, and you need to go to your backpack to equip it on your belt before you can use it. Loot a crate, and you need to hover over every single item and hit a button on all of those items to transfer them over because a "loot all" button doesn't exist. The game doesn't pause when you're on a different screen, so the lack of these features makes the game needlessly frustrating, since you're wasting time and open to getting hit.

It should be noted that the game uses generative AI for the voices of anything robotic. AI voices already sound out of place, so it fits well in EverRail, but you can tell that something is amiss when numbers are called out normally, such as one hundred forty-seven instead of one four seven like you'd expect. Elsewhere, the sound effects are good, but the use of lasers is unexpected when most sci-fi games still opt for normal bullets for their guns. Graphically, the game looks fine enough, but HDR seems to have some issues when staying on the graphical options screen.

One interesting bit to note is that the game isn't guaranteed to run on Linux. We tried running the title on the latest version of Bazzite using an Nvidia GPU, and while the game goes to the initial splash screen, it kicks you back out to the desktop right afterward. This occurs with every version of Proton, so you can't fix it by going with the latest CachyOS or GE version of Proton versus Valve's own version. However, the game runs absolutely fine on a PC running SteamOS. We've seen this sort of thing happen with some games, where they don't like any other version of Linux outside of Steam OS, but it's such a rarity that the quirk is more pronounced on the rare occasion when it does occur.

As it stands now, EverRail is an interesting combination of a bunch of different but familiar mechanics. While they all work fine together, the result is quite brutal due to the overwhelming number of things to handle as well as the game's initial tuning for multiplayer rather than the solo experience. EverRail is scheduled to stay in Early Access for at least a year, but there is quite a bit to keep people invested if they're interested in the experience before the eventual 1.0 release.