A Bumpy Ride

There's something to be said for a game where you can relax, turn your brain off, and not have to worry about doing anything. If you've read my text reviews before, you might recognize that I opened my Verdant Skies review with that very line and, sadly, that game turned out to be a bit too lacking. Now, we have another relaxing game. Will it be any better, or are we in for...

DEVELOPER: Cosmoporium Games

PUBLISHER: Cosmoporium Games

RELEASED: May 1, 2026

RATING: N/A

AVAILABLE: Steam

PRICE: $14.99

VERSION PLAYED: 1.0.6

Well, it's a promising start, I'll give it that. There have been plenty of times in the past where I watched a trailer for a game, either old or new, reacted with varying degrees of positivity, and wishlisted it to check it out at some point for a future project. But it's very rare for me to have watched a trailer and instantly thought "I HAVE to get this game now!", and such is the case with A Bumpy Ride, with its adorable aesthetic along with gameplay that seemed to strike just the right balance of engaging and relaxing. You play as a train driver, and it's your job to deliver passengers to various destinations.

As all the citizens in this world are animals, you can choose to play as one of two cats or a dog. I picked the dog, because obviously.

When playing for the first time, you're put into a tutorial level that teaches you the controls (you can play with the mouse, keyboard, or gamepad; I went with the keyboard) as well as the very basics of how to play. There's more to the actual game that the tutorial doesn't mention, but it's just enough to get you started.

The controls you'll be using the most all in one picture. The device on the right controls your speed, which can be changed by dragging the handle with the mouse, or using W and S. Clicking the rope at the top, or pressing Space, blows your whistle. When you come to a junction in the track, a switcher will appear at the bottom of the screen. You choose your direction by clicking it or pressing A or D. Finally, the map in the bottom right can be opened by clicking it or pressing M.

The game world is fairly small, and starts out even smaller, as there are only two cities you can travel between to begin with. Tracks that lead elsewhere have various obstacles at certain points, blocking access to different areas. These obstacles require either money, some type of freight, or an upgrade to your train to remove, and with each new area you access, you have to fill in the tracks on the map as you travel, so there's a nice sense of exploration in the early game.

As previously mentioned, your goal is to deliver as many passengers as you can to their destinations each day, with one base in-game day starting at 8 AM and automatically ending, regardless of whether or not you're in transit with or without passengers, at 10 PM (about 14 minutes of real time). It's not just a matter of getting people from A to B as quick as possible, though. There are certain things you'll have to do, or avoid doing, to keep your passengers happy. Obeying all traffic signs along the way to their destinations, or making brief stops at certain scenic locales to let them take photos will make your passengers happier, while things like taking sharp curves too fast, emergency braking (hitting reverse while your speed is in the red), or arriving late will sour their moods somewhat. And by the way, the traffic signs only affect passengers on your train; if you're by yourself, feel free to zip around with reckless abandon!...though as you open up the map, more trains will show up, so maybe keep an eye out for them.

You can hover over each of the tickets to discern your passengers' current moods.

In addition to the exploration aspect, there's a good sense of progression as well. Not only do you start out with only a small portion of the map open to you, your train is also a bit lacking. It's slow, taking a while to get up to top speed, and can only carry two passengers at a time. It's perfectly serviceable for the tiny area you start in, but as more places open up to you, it quickly becomes apparent you'll need upgrades. Thankfully, the more trips you complete, the more experience you gain, and as you start leveling up, those upgrades become available for you to buy with the money your passengers pay you.

The upgrades come in various forms, from staff members who do things like give you an extra couple of hours each day (starting at 6 AM instead of 8) or increasing your train's speed, boosts to the train itself, such as larger passenger capacity or a bigger water tank (water being what your train runs on), or cosmetic changes to your train's color scheme and horn.

A small selection of some of the schemes of shade you can saturate your steam train with.

That's where the first of my nitpicks comes in. You can only give your train a preset color scheme (more being unlocked as you level up), and each preset comes with its own train horn. The only thing you can individually change is the color of the train's flags, which you barely, if ever, see during actual gameplay, although I will give the devs major kudos for having a bunch of LGBTQ+ flags among the options. Still, I do wish you could mix and match the color schemes and horns, or better still, custom color individual train parts yourself, as I found many of the preset designs a bit too similar to one another.

And while we're in nitpick mode, I'll get my other main gripe out of the way, and that's the map. Now, the map in and of itself is fine. Again, I like how you fill in the tracks as you go, and you can place stamps of varying designs and colors to mark points of interest, traffic signs, etc. You can place up to 250 stamps which is more than plenty; even after marking everything I could, I didn't even use half that many. No, my problem is that when on my way to a given destination, every time I came up to a junction, I was bringing up the map to remind myself which way to turn and for me, this breaks the flow of gameplay a bit. I feel a minimap would go a long way to alleviating that.

I also ran into a couple of issues - one gameplay related, the other more technical - which I hesitate to bring up as they might be problems, or might just be something I missed. During my runs, there will be plenty of times when I come to a split track with a traffic signal set to red, indicating you should stop and wait for another train to pass, but I'll check the map and either there aren't any trains anywhere close to me, or if there is one, it's heading away from me. And once, I had the opposite issue; I came upon and passed a green light...only to careen into a train at the next junction. I'm not sure if that's a bug or if there's just some quirk to the way the signals work that I'm not catching. Then on the technical side of things, when double-clicking the game's desktop icon to launch the game, I'll get this error message:

In case you can't see the image, the error text reads "DirectX 12 is not supported on your system. Try running without the -dx12 or -d3d12 command line argument."

Thankfully, going into the game's properties in Steam and choosing a different renderer resolves the issue, and I was unsure if I should even bring this up because my computer's not the greatest, except for two things. One, I know from reading the Steam discussions that I'm not the only one who's run into this issue and two, as far as I can gather, the game's demo also runs on DirectX 12 and it launches perfectly fine, so I'm not sure what the issue is with the main game.

All these minor issues aside, however, A Bumpy Ride is an incredibly fun game. It's a great way to wind down at the end of the day, with a steady sense of progression, and that "just one more" feeling is definitely present and accounted for! It felt like I was always finding something new to do or try throughout the 18 or so hours I spent with it. From what I can tell, this is Cosmoporium Games' first title. If so, I'll echo my sentiment from earlier in this review: it's a promising start!

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