Burden Street Station Review – Is This Surreal Life

I have played a number of games over the years that I have found difficult to describe to readers. Burden Street Station has, in that regard, thrown me flat on my butt. The debut title from Irish developer IODINE Studios is not only totally uninterested in approachability, but seems to be unbound by the very basics of video game design. I suspect that will make it very appealing to a certain kind of gamer, but most folks will have a lot of trouble even understanding what it is they’re meant to be doing. This surrealist narrative adventure is truly unlike anything you’ve ever experienced.

You play as some indescribable golem celestial creature composed of three schools of thought represented by polygonal shapes. You work in the celestial library of heaven sorting and cataloguing stories by the type of moment they contain. Each of these stories are sentient books, and one day in doing your routine work sorting you come across the impossible – a story that has no moment. She’s given the name Memo, and the two of you are brought before the Great Curator to explain your non-moment crimes. The two of your are sent on a train to do… something, which I didn’t understand, and find out along the way that God has just died. Super straightforward so far.

On the way to your destination, the train breaks down on the tracks at a place called Burden Street Station. This dead end neighborhood is the first of three you’ll explore that is, I think, a manifestation of someone else’s dream. The world is displayed as a 3D field made up entirely of 2D shapes, making it hard to understand where anything is at any time, where you’re walking, where you’ve come from, and where you can go. Abstract really doesn’t begin to cover it. There are a few main characters and a dozen throwaway NPCs in each area, and when entering dialogue with them you’ll see the gameplay unfold.

Starting out, the three schools of thought that compose your character (affectionately called Bee Eater by Memo) are confident, cynical, and forward. When you enter dialogue, at first you have those three options to choose from to influence how you answer. Only one of them is correct and will progress the conversation, and you can try as many times as you need with no consequence. After helping a character navigate through a personal issue by physically shapeshifting your body to match the correct school of thought, you’ll see their “moment” displayed in an even more abstract world and capture it in a new school of thought, which range from “mysterious” and “killer” to “cat.”

Several characters will have entirely new dialogue strings open up after extracting one moment, moving to a new location, interacting with other characters, and learning more about themselves. As you keep adding new options to your golem, you will go from three options in every dialogue choice all the way up to twenty. In the beginning, this feature is very cool, but by the third area I had so many options I just had to trial-and-error every answer to find the right one because I couldn’t comprehend that many dialogue choices at once. Maybe that’s intentional?

Navigating the world is kind of tiresome, as spatially it kind of makes sense most of the time but not always. Movement is strange, but thankfully there’s a run button I never let go of during the three hour adventure. I’ll be honest, Burden Street Station is basically talking to an NPC, learning stuff about them and their (admittedly very well thought out) history, transforming into a school of thought that will aid them in fighting their respective trauma, and then taking their extracted moment to learn a new school of thought. Head to another NPC, rinse and repeat. That’s the long and short of it..

While it was hard to figure out what was literally going on at any given time, conceptually the stories these NPCs shared were really intriguing. I got very emotionally swept up in the story of the final world that involved a mentally ill father and a daughter that was desperately terrified of him but wanted nothing but to get him help. There was also a nice story in the first world about a transgender character coming to terms with society’s perception of her. These heavy themes are delivered through well-written stories delivered in the most unapproachable way possible. I’m also quite glad I experienced them at all.

Burden Street Station is a game that doesn’t really seem interested in being played, in a strange way, and for that I’ll have to give it major points for uniqueness. I have had a really hard time figuring out exactly what is happening here, if it’s a dream, or the afterlife, or if these people are even real. By the end I determined the game’s stance is that it simply doesn’t matter. It’s just about examining life’s little moments and remembering that each one of them is just a piece of a story so long it’d take a lifetime to tell. Burden Street Station was very neat, but also really aggravating to play in the latter half due to the overwhelming and confusing dialogue choices at every moment. I need to be clear that I think most gamers straight up will not enjoy this game. Again, that might be the point, but if you’ve made it through and still think this sounds good, it’ll likely end up as one of your favorite indie games of all time.

Nirav reviewed Burden Street Station on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.