Laying Track for Awkward Aliens
Cosmic Express is a puzzle game about planning train routes across a series of tiny space stations. You lay down the tracks yourself, and the goal is to get each alien home. Each alien has a home of their own, and there's only room for one extraterrestrial at a time in the passenger car, so the order you pick them up in matters as much as the shape of your line. The puzzles are cute on the surface and harder than they look, with hundreds of levels to work through. The design comes from Alan Hazelden, who also worked on A Monster's Expedition and Sokobond, so expect fiendish layouts that punish a careless loop. The art is by Tyu Orphinae (Klondike Collective), and the ambient soundtrack is by Nick Dymond (Maia, The Colonists).
Playing Together
The game carries the Remote Play Together feature, which lets friends join in over a session rather than needing their own copy. Since the puzzles are about watching a route play out and spotting where it goes wrong, it works well as a group activity: one person draws, everyone else spots the alien you forgot to collect or the station you boxed yourself out of. Levels are small and self-contained, so handing the controls back and forth between attempts is easy.
Before You Start
Go in expecting a slow burn rather than a quick win. The levels are abstract and minimal, the alien passengers are cute, and the solutions are not. Some layouts will take a few tries to see the trick, and the later ones are meant to be fiendish. The tone is relaxed and colorful, with a calm soundtrack underneath, but the difficulty tag is there for a reason.