Zephyr Express

About the game

Zephyr Express puts you in the shoes of the only conductor on a passenger train. Little requests keep popping up in the cars: a passenger wants the Wi-Fi fixed, a seat needs the wrench, someone would like a drink. Each request shows the symbol of the tool it needs, so the job is simple to describe and busy to do: grab the matching tool, carry it to the request and stand there until the task is done.

Jeffrey Gensler made the game for GBJAM 13, a month-long jam for games that follow the look and limits of the original Game Boy. He has said it was inspired by co-op kitchen games such as Overcooked and PlateUp, which shows in the way the rounds start calm and get hectic as the train grows. There is no game over: the run goes on round after round, and the only thing at stake is your score.

How a round works

Across the top of the screen, a minimap on the left shows the cars of the train and a bar on the right shows how far along the route it is; a round ends when the train reaches the end of the line. Between them sits a face that sums up how your customers feel. Finishing a request earns a point and cheers them up, and the rarer tools please them more. When the round is over the game turns that mood into a bonus: a grumpy train costs you points, a happy one adds some, and a perfectly happy train earns an extra unlock.

Between rounds you spend unlocks on the upgrade screen:

• Add car makes the train longer, with more seats and more requests.
• New tools (wrench, drink, cat and music) open up once the train has two or three cars. Each brings its own kind of request.
• Run sooner, run speed up and walk speed up make the conductor quicker.
• Task speed up makes every request finish faster.
• More open tasks lets more requests wait at the same time, which means more points to collect if you can keep up.

Getting started

Try the tutorial first. The main menu has a short tutorial that walks you through moving, picking up the tool and finishing your first few requests.

Pick a difficulty. Every round starts the customers' mood afresh, and the rounds get longer as the run goes on. Casual always starts them neutral and gives two unlocks per round. Easy also gives two, but later rounds begin with grumpier passengers. Hard gives only one unlock, starts in a bad mood from the first round and gets worse, and each request cheers people up a little less.

Watch the stairs. Each car has an upper and a lower floor, and a request only counts when the tool is on the same floor as it. If the conductor gets stuck on the stairs at high speed, keep walking left or right and the conductor will settle on one of the floors.

Tips

Carry more than one tool. The game lets the conductor hold several tools at once, a quirk the author decided to keep. Picking up two or three before setting off saves a lot of running.

Spend the first unlocks on cars. The extra tools only open up on a longer train, and the new kinds of request are worth more happiness than the Wi-Fi fixes you start with.

Keep an eye on the face. If it starts to frown, leave the upgrades that add more requests for later and buy speed instead.

Playing it here

This is the author's own ROM for the original Game Boy, the same file he offers on the game's page, running in an emulator in your browser. The game has no save of its own; a run lasts until you close the page. The repository also contains an NES version for two players, which is not offered here.