Oh, Thomas the Tank Engine, you delightful locomotive: How we love you and your haunting homunculi visage, your community of animate rail engines, your diligent adherence to the tasks of Sir Topham Hatt, your habit of getting launched with incredible violence by an inscrutable malfunction of physical law.
Okay, so that last bit is a new addition to the Tank Engine canon, and we have Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor to thank for it. Released on Steam this week, Wonders of Sodor casts Thomas and his troublingly faced peers in a train sim where players navigate the many duties of the North Western Railway—duties that have a tendency to punt these sentient traincars into the upper stratosphere with no discernible cause.
Wonders of Sodor has been enjoying a bit of a viral launch, in large part thanks to the sheer number of videos showing unpredictable physics bugs that forcefully jettison Thomas & Co. off the railroad tracks. Thomas will be comfortably tooting along in pleasant, picturesque comfort before he’s suddenly brutally repulsed by gravity, as though being punished by some unseen and vindictive higher power who has, at last, deemed that the world should no longer suffer the living horror of the Man-Train.
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I’ve been surveying the carnage throughout the day, and my social media algorithms have been irreparably altered. I’m now being fed a steady diet of Thomas being shunted heavenward with impossible violence: I’ve seen him corkscrewed at catastrophic speeds, catapulted by vengeful telekinesis after a collision, and flung with a petulant contempt by the fickle simulated physics of Unreal Engine 5.
I have no complaints.
And its early reviewers on Steam are pretty fond of it, too—even with the unaccountable existential violence. Wonders of Sodor is, at time of writing, sitting at a Very Positive rating after 203 reviews. Looks like they didn’t get Ringo Starr for the narration, though. But perhaps it’s better if he didn’t see what’s being done to Thomas at his age.
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