Played a few hours of the A-Train All Aboard! Tourism demo and it’s a surprisingly difficult demo to complete the objective in, it times out after 1 year of gameplay (for me that was about five hours worth), and I’d completed one and was ~85% to the other objective. Another month or two and I’d have had it, I reckon.
Given what I’ve heard about these games requiring you to be delving into the real estate, market and services industries to make most of your money, I’m sort of surprised the demo restricts you to trains and land only. I think that’s because it’s actually the first tutorial level of the real game, but it’s still weird!
The cargo stuff was also sort of incomprehensible, the in-game help and the tutorial really didn’t make it clear how it was supposed to work. Maybe that would’ve made up the difference in revenue?
There’s also the rough edge that the tutorial suggests you develop a new train, but it’s not specific enough so you can quite easily spend a month and a few billion yen developing a “new” train which is just a differently coloured version of the one you already have. Oops!
I think I’m tempted to give this a go, even though the performance (and oddly extensive graphics settings menu) on Switch (at least in portable mode) makes me really wonder if a PC port might be forthcoming (Neo ATLAS 1469, their previous touch-friendly game on Switch, is also on Steam in English), and the price tag feels sort of steep. It also sounds like the save game from the demo carries over to the full game, but I haven’t verified that.