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Love point and click mysteries? If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers from developers Laura Hunt and Thomas Möhring is a narrative-driven pixel-art experience taking place on a train in the late 1920s.

You explore the stories of four different characters through multiple locations, and the level of quality here is just ridiculously good. How is this free? Madness. Something clearly weird is going on as you find out right from the first scene which I won't spoil but do check out the trailer below:

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It's a tale of "dark and troubling things" they say, well that's clear enough from the trailer that definitely sent a few chills down my spine today. Something to note as well is that the developer mentions it "contains references to thematic elements such as racism, homophobia, mental illness, murder and suicide" so keep that in mind.

Made with Adventure Game Studio, do note that if you have more than one monitor it probably won't like it and try to spread across both screens. You can run it in windowed mode simply by adding "--windowed" to how you launch it like so:

'/home/liam/Downloads/train/ioawn4t' --windowed

Download If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers free from itch.io.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

Migwell Mar 11, 2021
Wow, this is my exact vibe. Thanks for pointing it out!
Arehandoro Mar 11, 2021
Quoting: MigwellWow, this is my exact vibe. Thanks for pointing it out!

Pan intended? :D

They had me until the moment the mystery turns into something paranormal.
whizse Mar 11, 2021
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2021 seems to be the year for free retro adventure games set on a train!
NoSt Mar 12, 2021
Looks like something I would definitely like playing. Thanks for the recommendation!
Regarding the multi-monitor problem, I experienced it with some old games and I was able to solve it using Lutris.
If you go to Configure -> System options -> Turns off monitors except and choose the monitor you want to use for the game, it will run correctly in full-screen mode using only that monitor.
I used this configuration to play Wizardry VII (yes, I'm an old school guy, heh).
oldominion Mar 12, 2021
Tried to run the ioawn4t as software but it does nothing, tried to run the ags64 and 32 this only showed a loading screen of the game and at 100% it crashed, am I doing something wrong?
Arch 5.11.5-arch1-1
Nvidia 460.56


Last edited by oldominion on 12 March 2021 at 1:05 pm UTC
Liam Dawe Mar 12, 2021
Quoting: oldominionam I doing something wrong?
Run the launch script in terminal, what is the output? Giving terminal output should be the first step for tech support posts.
oldominion Mar 12, 2021
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: oldominionam I doing something wrong?
Run the launch script in terminal, what is the output? Giving terminal output should be the first step for tech support posts.

Okay I just played around and I don't know if this was supposed to do but it runs after I renamed the file with an .sh at the end then chmod +x ioawn4t.sh and ./ioawn4t.sh
F.Ultra Mar 13, 2021
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That this game is free is almost insulting
Plintslîcho Mar 14, 2021
Wow, this game is a true gem!

Loco Motive was fun (and is also another fantastic adventure game!). This one here has some outstanding atmosphere to it though. The pixel art is fantastic, but also the music and -- and this really came as a surprise to me -- the sounds are amazing. They really managed to bring the different scenes to life with the background noises.

It's an unusual, rather dark and sometimes even a little eerie adventure game. Personally, I found the second story quite tragic and it even got me thinking for a little bit after I finished playing the game.

I really hope that the team will release some more games and like others before me have said, if they are going to charge for it, it will be worth every penny!

Thanks for pointing this game out, Liam.
Eike May 16, 2021
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I played it now as well, and it is very dark and very good.

The developers plan to bring it to Steam. It's not yet decided if they can do it for Linux as well. And they'll bring some possibility to support them (to itch and Steam) - which I will use, as the game is worth my money for sure.
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