Tricky Tracks
- Brand
- SBB
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Automotive
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Maxomedia AG
Objective
Gleis 7 is SBB's youth travel pass for 16-to-25-year-olds, offering free rides after 7pm and built around one of Switzerland's largest online youth communities. Maxomedia built Tricky Tracks to give that community something to do on the platform — light entertainment that keeps rail and public-transport themes in view without pushing a direct sales message.
Solution
The player opens a tilt-shift diorama of a Swiss landscape and takes hold of a plunger in the top-right corner of the screen, pulling it back and releasing to launch a miniature train onto the tracks — the force and timing of that pull decide how far and how accurately it travels. The goal each round is to get the train from station A to station B without it running out of momentum or derailing. Levels are grouped into boxes of track laid out across regional maps — Drei-Seen-Land and Röstigraben at launch, with Goldküste and Wallis added later. Between shots, the player can rotate, pan and zoom the camera to take in the hills, villages and bridges the train passes over before lining up the next launch.
- 1
The player opens trickytracks.ch, installs the required Unity Web Player plugin, and lands on a spare, typographic start screen before entering the game.
- 2
The player picks a map region — Drei-Seen-Land or Röstigraben at launch, with Goldküste and Wallis announced as later additions — then selects a level from a named list within that region's box of tracks.
- 3
Each level renders as a tilt-shift miniature of Swiss terrain — hills, a village, bridges — with shallow focus that makes the whole scene look like a toy railway; the objective is always the same, stated up front: get the passenger train from station A to station B.
- 4
Before launching, the player freely rotates, pans, and zooms the camera to scout the route — spotting turns, bridges, and climbs ahead of time.
- 5
A pinball-style plunger in the corner of the screen is the sole control: the player drags it back to set launch power and releases it to fire the train.
- 6
Too little power leaves the train short of the station; too much sends it flying off the rails in a crash. Some track sections act as ramps, and players deliberately overshoot them just to watch the train launch and wreck, since the physics rewards experimenting.
- 7
Along the route the train must clear obstacles that grow more elaborate level by level — switches, junctions, car-crossing level crossings, tunnels, and steep grades — where timing the launch to match a switch or passing car matters as much as raw power.
- 8
Failure carries no penalty: the player simply resets and re-launches with adjusted power until the train comes to rest at the target station.
- 9
Completing a level scores points based on number of attempts, total time spent, and accumulated achievement bonuses; later boxes raise the difficulty sharply, with cliffside stations and traffic-choked city levels, and the terrain hides easter eggs — a Bernese-dialect language option, a crashed UFO, and a dinosaur skeleton.
- 10
The game ships with 15 levels across the starting boxes — roughly two hours of play — after which it teases a further box of 5 levels as 'coming soon'.
