It’s a dark movie, but I really enjoy the gritty brutalism of the film Snowpiercer. If I had to venture a guess, the team at Icebird Studios enjoyed the fatalism of that movie as well; their upcoming Early Access-bound game EverRail carries familiar themes. Recently, I went hands-on with the game ahead of that Early Access launch and had a few thoughts to share. Brace yourself for a survival game that asks a great deal of the player, plunging them into an infinite winter as they guide a battery-powered train through a shattered world where the number of live bodies on your train is all the lives you have to spare. Welcome to EverRail.
EverRail’s demo starts off with a bit of a tutorial to showcase how the mechanics work. You’ll learn some basic shooting and resource gathering before you exit into the bright wasteland of this frozen world. Standing against the stark white of the snow is a train with a handful of cars, powered and ready for what lies ahead. Boarding it and moving the controls forward…well, the rails ahead are the only guidance you’re getting here. Explore the world as you try to find anyone who has survived whatever world-ending event has struck the planet. You won’t find a game that holds your hand here.
Dungeons are fun with friends in EverRail.
The world of EverRail is procedurally generated. Yes, your train is locked to the tracks, but you aren’t. You’ll need to stop periodically to explore stations, towns, wrecks, and other establishments throughout the landscape to try to find anyone that can join the mobile city you’re building. You see, your “lives” are literally the lives of the people on your train. Any death means that count is reduced by one, permanently. Standing still isn’t an option, as the batteries of your train are charged by movement, so sitting in any one place for an extended period of time is just a slow cycle to zero.
Your train has many paths in EverRail.
Onboard your train, you’ll find that it’s a mostly empty canvas. Gathering materials like metal scraps, isotopes, technology bits, and of course, passengers, you’ll slowly grow the train and the equipment and capabilities of your mobile platform. Ultimately, you’ll even need to grow the platform itself, adding additional cars to the train to house your growing passenger manifest. As you rattle down the track, you can scout ahead using a sort of glider. This allows you to stray from the tracks a bit without risking your crew freezing to death. You can also collect materials with it, and look ahead to make sure the tracks are as clear as they looked from the cockpit. A quick look at the components attached to the glider modules suggests there will be a great many additional ways to use this glider over time.
Scouting ahead with my glider in EverRail
Back inside the train car, you’ll find a familiar building system to add platforms, elevators, boxes for storage, additional batteries for capacity, engine enhancements, armory, refineries, and much more. Adding robot arms to various refineries allows them to process different materials - useful as you don’t have a great deal of space to expand, so you’ll have to instead be very efficient.
EverRail is currently limited to just two hours for the demo; just a taste of what the world has to offer. While it’s experimental, it also offers the chance to bring three additional friends on our journey, which makes raiding dungeons a far safer proposition. These dungeons are currently limited (or at least as far as I’ve seen) to one tileset – rt of factory that you can raid for scrap parts, pipes, plates, and other bits you’ll need to further expand. Again - just a touch of what will eventually come together across the game’s eventual Early Access journey that kicks off sometime in the spring of 2026. Let us know in the comments - does a permadeath train-based survival game sound like your sort of excitement? It’s certainly unique, and one we’ll keep an eye on as it rattles down that Early Access track.
