As an only child, I don't instantly relate to tales about siblings and their relationships, but as games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons have shown, they are still quite capable of moving me. And as a fan of graphic adventure games and quirky bits of fantasy to boot, I was immediately drawn to Blackwood Crossing, a first-person journey from the UK-based development team of PaperSeven. Set in England on a train during the 1990s, what has been shown off so far reveals quite the unique, charming and dark adventure indeed...albeit one harmed by a few issues in its current state.

Our story centers around Scarlett and Finn, a pair of siblings who find themselves waking up on a moving train with no idea how they got there. You play as Scarlett, who is a teenager, who finds herself growing up and becoming more distant from her kid brother that she used to play with, who still runs around in a superhero cape and operates out of a treehouse. And when Finn runs off, Scarlett chases after him through a train that seemingly never ends in an effort to find him, with everything repeating itself over and over while getting progressively bizarre to the point where grass starts growing everywhere and Finn's treehouse magically appears all of a sudden. The mystery of the train certainly leads to an intriguing setup indeed, with its Twilight Zone-style scenario where Scarlett wakes up again and again to find herself confronting visions of her past with Finn, and those of her deceased parents and various loved ones as well. Who just happen to all be wearing various creepy masks and are frozen in place.

It seems like an odd choice to focus on for one of the game's strengths so far, but I absolutely loved the mask designs, crafted out of cardboard, paper mache, scraps of cloth, sequins, and more. When we see Finn in the treehouse, he's shown to actually be quite gifted, able to craft puppet shows, light displays, papercraft, and such. So the decision to put a focus on arts and crafts was a wise one indeed, especially when it contrasts with the story's darker aspects, as you watch these figures enact conversations evoking confusion and horror as they hint at the scars that our siblings have gained throughout their family's troubled history. In general, the graphics are particularly impressive, especially when it comes to making the more vibrant aspects stand out.

Speaking of the conversations between our mysterious masked figures, they make up one of the game's most notable types of puzzles, in which you have to listen to individual snippets provided by each one, then match them up with the second person making up the other end in order to take down a barrier. It's a simple idea, but one that works quite well, rewarding classic observation and deduction. You also have your standard puzzles involving having to locate a correct item, others like one where you figure out a correct order of photographs in order to decode a password, and hints at puzzles to come in the forms of various skills and abilities Scarlett gains as she advances, which suggest some potential elemental-based obstacles or similar challenges to come. But so far, the challenge appears to be at the perfect level for a game like this with a heavy focus on narrative.

Unfortunately, Blackwood Crossing gets bogged down with a batch of annoying gameplay issues, at least in its current form. For starters, interacting with objects and people is done by looking at a white circle that appears on them, which provides you with your interaction options. But for some reason, the prompts never appear until you're looking just slightly off to the left or right of where you instructed to look. Not to mention an annoying puzzle moment or two. Case in point, as seen in the above video, one simple puzzle calls for for you to grab some tape and scissors, but you aren't able to actually pick them up until Finn asks you to find them. I know, these are minor gripes, and the game is still only in beta right now, fair enough.

Not exactly a minor gripe, though, is the clunky inventory system, which highly suggests that Blackwood Crossing is meant to be played with a controller. The Z and X keys are used to cycle through your items, with C to put anything you picked up away, which are all placed below the traditional WASD movement keys in an unorthodox manner. The number keys can be used to bring up specific items, but there's no hint as to which one brings up which item. And this may sound like a similar system used in other games like Grim Fandango, to name an example, but cycling through the inventory here feels painfully slower compared to other instances of this (though that could just be my PC). And even after that, there was only about one instance where actually looking for an item in the inventory was required, with most other interactions just naturally bringing out the correct items automatically.

And the kicker on top of all that is that thanks to a bug, this awkward system kept me from completing the actual preview version. As mentioned earlier, Scarlett gains various abilities such as reanimation and fire absorption, which you can perform when prompted. For some reason, though, the prompts are assigned to the number keys...which as mentioned, are also used to manage your inventory. So during a moment when some fires broke out in the treehouse and Scarlett is tasked with putting them out, the game kept telling me to press 1 to absorb them, and yet all that happened was Scarlett having whipped out the sketchbook I picked up earlier. Oops.

To be fair, it could be possible that there was a puzzle solution I wasn't seeing (though a quick tutorial of how to absorb fire right before suggested otherwise) and perhaps things are vastly better when using a controller. But Blackwood Crossing does have a few kinks that need to be ironed out before its release early next year for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, so here's hoping things get the polish they need, because Scarlett and Finn's tale is quite fascinating so far and it deserves the best treatment it can get. So yeah, let's see if PaperSeven can get a smoother train ride going.