Tren, a game within a game, is a window into the spirit of Media Molecule

There’s a lot of parenting in Tren. This is surprising in some ways, because Tren is ostensibly a virtual train set that comes with a suite of ingenious puzzles and race challenges attached to it. But pull back a little and it starts to make more sense. With Tren, John Beech, the game’s design lead, and Media Molecule’s newly minted creative director, asked himself if he could make a “triple-A” game inside Dreams, on his own, while simultaneously renovating a house and becoming a parent. The answer, in true Media Molecule style, is that he achieved all of that except for the “on his own” bit, but we’ll get to that. For now, welcome to Tren. There’s a lot of parenting in it.

And it crops up in a lot of places. Tren drops you into a world of toys and living room floors, and the main attraction is a simple toddler’s train set. It’s the kind with carved wooden track and chunky vehicles to ride on it, vehicles which all clip together with magnets on the buffers. Even to say these words is to feel the particular weight of these objects in your hands, their pleasant triviality, their painted, planed away smoothness. All great, and Tren delivers on this as you might expect. But my absolute favourite thing about Tren, I reckon, is the moment at which you can attach additional cargo trucks to your train. You maneuver it under a set of plastic cranes, and the arms of the cranes grab the cargo, and then? Then they sort of hover, anxiously, raising and lowering the cargo as they wait for you to get safely into position.

I tell myself: I know this particular anxiety. It’s the anxiety, with much attendant arm flippering, that used to erupt whenever my daughter was in pre-school and in the playground attempting something new. I’d hover, not wanting to intrude, but I also couldn’t help myself. Yes, it’s a lovely slide, but think about safety! I still feel this anxiety now in the odd moment around the house, too, when she asks to try out a fountain pen, say, or asks if she can carry the scissors, very carefully, between rooms. I should let go, and I try to let go – and yet! And yet you get those hovering cargo crane arms, that parental hesitancy, twitching, juddering, urging Tren into the right position, hoping that the whole thing goes well and doesn’t become a bad memory.

Of course, I am ahead of myself here, lost in details. But Tren is all details. I had a morning with Tren recently at Media Molecule’s newly renovated offices, and this thing, honestly, is a thing of pieces and elements and little bits of business, just like a real toy train set shaken out of a box onto the floor. (Because it’s built in Dreams, it is of course a train set too: there’s a creative mode with loads of new pieces.) Tren’s a thing built of care and attention and with an attitude of simply not being able to stop when it comes to the addition of one more idea, one more gimmick. You get such richness, such strata. Is that a blob of Blu Tack fixing some of the scenery in place as Tren whistles along? Absolutely. Is that a friendly seam of plastic running down the centre of Tren, because in the fiction of this world the chunky plastic body of the train once came from an imperfect mold? 100 hundred percent yes. Is that a hint of the echoing glockenspiel cheer of European train station announcement jingles kicking off the next part of Tren’s playful, shifting soundtrack? You betzler it is. Tren is full of this stuff.

Over time, I came to realise that Tren reveals itself in arcs. It has layers. It’s like moving outwards through planetary rings, bobbling along with the friendly chunks of ice. So let’s go. What’s at the centre?

At the centre of it all is Tren, the chunky plastic train with the seam running down the middle and the magnetic buffers for bolting things on. In the game’s overworld, Tren runs on a track that’s threaded through a series of rooms inspired by Beech’s house, mid-renovation. There’s lovingly realised drywall, exposed pipes, and even house bricks laying around, all wonderfully thick and rough-edged and – of course – stamped with the Media Molecule logo in the central depression. This overworld is a delight in itself: an unfolding space shaped by the kind of scattered domestic chaos early Speilberg was so good at invoking. But every now and then on the track there are hubs that you can move Tren onto, and then you’re whisked off to a challenge level.

1 of 3 Caption Attribution Tren’s campaign and creative mode will be playable for everyone within Dreams.

This is where most of the game takes place, I think. Start at the beginning of the track, get to the end goal, but do so by navigating a challenge of some kind. These start simply, with points which allow you to switch between different tracks by flicking a thumbstick as you approach them. Then there are pressure switches to run Tren over which might open a barrier somewhere else on the track. At this point it’s clear why you’ve got one trigger to go forward and another to go backwards: Tren is not a straight-ahead train game, but rather one about backtracking, shunting, navigating complex routes.