How to Use the Subway: An abstract commute to anywhere
How to Use the Subway is a minimalist commuter simulator that uses simple lines to simulate railway stations, lines, and networks.
LEFT-FIELD is a series of reviews and essays on new and old independent games that have an experimental or narrative quality.
The art of abstraction lies in conveying the most meaning with the least representation. Early video game developers, armed with simple vectors or prose as their toolset, excelled at this. In the imaginations of the earliest developers and gamers, lines of light fired from a cathode ray cast little galaxies in games like Spacewar! or Asteroids, from which the visual limitations must have seemed obvious, but the conceptual possibilities limitless.
Described as a 'portrait of transit', How to Use the Subway is an ode to that simple art of abstraction. It's a small game that implies a vast world in the player's imagination. Players navigate networks of subway stations, with the stations, trains, and maps represented by simple lines and text. The game's minimalism draws the player's attention to the elegant relationships that form between the people and train lines that come and go over the vast network of stations.
For a simple game, there's a good attention to detail. The audio creates a sense of place, from the announcement voice-overs to the rattle of the trains. Maps and simple timetables guide the player through twenty-one stations across five color-coded lines. There are even little tasks to reunite objects with characters at certain stations or on certain trains, encouraging the player to explore.
Small expressions from fellow commuters add personality to Subway. Most of the dialogue is in fragments, suggesting words overheard and lost in the noise of the crowd. Others are more cryptic. I like those that suggest many of the travellers are also lost, asking themselves things like: Where am I going? Where am I? How to go home? You get the impression that everyone is as directionless as you are.
Subway is the newest installment in a microgenre that I will call a commuter simulator, a game that directs players to explore little worlds through imagined commuter networks. For instance, some have already compared Subway to the similar 2015 game Subway Adventure, a 2015 game by prolific independent developer Increpare Games. I humbly also suggest the 2017 game Endless Express by Florian Veltman. What How to Use the Subway does better is to minimise the aesthetics of the destination to focus on the innate joy of exploring a train network and wondering where the game's trains will take the player next.
Subway is the work of Quewon, a South Korean independent developer also known as Q1. Quewon has been developing small experimental games since 2020, often as submissions to game jams. Subway was created for the fiftieth installment of the independent game and zine anthology Indiepocalypse in March 2024.
How to Use the Subway can be played for free on Quewon's website, or as part of Indiepocalypse Issue 50.
